Sony will discontinue the PS5’s Accolades feature later this year as the system has received less use than the tech giant had expected.
The PS5 Community Awards feature allows players to commend other players for helpful and generous actions. But Sony says Accolades hasn’t received the commitment it had hoped for.
“In the fall of 2022 [that’s spring in the Southern Hemisphere]the Accolades feature on PlayStation 5 will no longer be supported”, a PlayStation support page (opens in new tab) discovered by push square (opens in new tab) read. “The feature hasn’t reached the level of usage we anticipated, so we’re refocusing our efforts. We encourage the community to continue to send each other positive messages.”
Rewards, not prizes
The Accolades feature was originally introduced to allow players to show their appreciation for one another. After completing an online match, players can choose a teammate to award one of three awards: Helpful, Welcoming, or Good Sport. The idea is to recognize generous players while encouraging greater positivity among multiplayer communities.
The system is also quite robust. You can only praise players who are not on your friends list, and you cannot send praise to the same player more than once in 12 hours. You can see all the prizes you’ve won through your PSN profile.
But while the player-led rewards program is ending, a new system is on the horizon. Sony announced its PS Stars loyalty program last month, which will reward players for spending time on the PS5 and PS4. Through Stars, players earn points for playing specific games or earning specific trophies. These points can be transferred to digital collectibles and PS Store funds. The new program is expected to launch worldwide later this year.
Not that there aren’t already plenty of features emerging from the PS5. Sony recently made one of its best features a lot easier to find, releasing an update that lets users turn on automatic low-latency mode in the settings menu. Between that and the addition of the PS5 VRR earlier this year, Sony’s flagship console looks beefier than ever.
