The social platform was designed to help players find others to team up with in specific games or discuss their favorite genres. It also worked as a lightweight social network with content sharing features, allowing you to upload your screenshots to relevant communities. PlayStation Communities ran alongside a paired mobile app which made using the features of the service infinitely more convenient. Unfortunately, the mobile app was shut down about a year ago, already heralding the end of the service which thus lost a lot of its functionality. The end of Communities was forewarned in the patch notes of 8.5 beta, and now we have official confirmation that the service is permanently shutting down in April. However, in many ways Communities was already a redundant service, with many social features built into the base PlayStation operating system and other apps already. Communities probably wasn’t most gamers’ first choice when it came to looking for a social platform, with so many other more popular dedicated services having established themselves as more ubiquitous - especially since the app bit the dust. It likely didn’t help that Communities is a relic of the PS4 era, not appearing on PS5 at all. Nonetheless, we assume at least some players will miss the platform and the friends they made with its help. The new update that will remove Communities is going to roll out sometime in early April, though obviously sunsetting an old feature isn’t the main purpose of 8.5. PlayStation users can look forward to a suite of improvements to the operating system, which is the main focus of the update itself.
