Sony is officially discontinuing the PlayStation 5-exclusive Accolades feature due to a lack of use. This ‘next gen’ menu allowed players to compliment others online, by rewarding them with ‘good sport’, ‘helpful’ or ‘welcoming’ labels. While these didn’t have an impact on gameplay or functionality, they were designed to be a nice way of shouting out other players in select games.
According to Sony, the feature hasn’t quite worked as intended, with many players refusing to engage with the system, or not knowing it exists at all. For this reason, players will no longer be able to share Accolades from spring 2022 onwards.
‘The feature hasn’t seen the level of usage we anticipated, so we are refocusing our efforts,’ Sony said. ‘We encourage the community to continue to send positive messages to one another.’
The Accolades feature, while great in theory, was never widely publicised, and it’s fair to assume ignorance plays an important part in its demise. Many online games also include their own Accolades-like systems – Overwatch, for example, allows you to give kudos to your fellow teammates.
Reducing the toxicity of playing online games is a noble goal, but it appears this system didn’t quite hit the mark for players.
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Accolades will be quietly put to rest in the coming months.
At this stage, the removal of Accolades appears to be the only major change Sony is planning for the PS5 – although future change is possible. The console is an absolute powerhouse, but has frequently been criticised for cluttered menus, and features considered ‘useless’, like the ‘Cards’ system that allows players to jump to specific parts of games.
For now, only Accolades is being removed, but it’s likely Sony will use this as an opportunity to reassess the usefulness of the console’s menu in future.
