PlayStation 5 is ditching its integration with Twitter, the social media platform recently rebranded as “X” after Elon Musk bought it for $US44 billion and then promptly crashed it into a brick wall like a dad coming home from a mid-life crisis bender in his brand-new Ferrari. Nintendo Switch will soon be the only gaming console you can still tweet from.
Sony announced the change in a new notification to PS5 users today. “As of November 13, 2023, interaction with X (formerly known as Twitter) will no longer function on PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 4 consoles,” the company wrote. “This includes the ability to view any content published on X on PS5/PS4, and the ability to post and view content, trophies, and other gameplay related activities on X directly from PS5/PS4 (or line an X account to do so).”
Twitter was one of three main social media platforms alongside Facebook and YouTube that the PS4 directly connected to when its new sharing feature first debuted back in 2013. There was an entirely new button on the DualShock 4 dedicated just to capturing images and quickly flinging them across the internet. The ease with which secrets, spoilers, exploits, glitches, and all kinds of other gameplay discoveries could be instantly shared completely changed how people played games and talked about them.
It won’t be impossible to keep sharing game moments to social media when Twitter integration ends later this month, but it’s another reminder that the current internet is dying. YouTube is a pain and Facebook is, well, Facebook. Neither facilitate the constantly updating wire service-like feed Twitter once embodied. The best way to get images of your PS5 and PS4 now is to have them automatically sync with Sony’s dedicated PlayStation app. From there you can repost them to one of Twitter’s many new clones, make a video on TikTok, or send them to your favorite Discord server.
Microsoft bailed on Twitter back in April, shortly after Musk announced he would start charging companies to have access to the platform’s API, the tool needed to make two programs work together. The tech billionaire accused the trillion dollar tech company of stealing Twitter’s idea to train its AI products. In the months since, celebrities, brands, and average users have all continued to abandon the dying platform. It lost roughly 13 percent of its users from a year ago, half its ad revenue, and is now apparently worth over $US20 billion less than what Musk originally paid for it.
Update 11/8/2023 1:50 p.m. ET: Don’t worry, Musk is on the case. “X is aiming to become a major streaming platform, but this will be less convenient for console players now that both Xbox and Playstation integration is gone,” one account tweeted on November 7. “I will look into this,” the billionaire wrote back.
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