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Comment by simondotau | Hacker News Reader

I’m not in the console gaming scene, but was this feature really used that much? Based on my own experience of Twitter, it seems not. (Remember, Sony has sold over 100 million PS4s and coming up to 50 million PS5s. Twitter is a global platform. The threshold for what constitutes "that much" is a lot higher than might be intuitive.)

And even to the extent that it was used, most of the benefit probably accrued to Sony and game publishers than to the Twitter platform. Nobody is joining Twitter to find out which map of Uncharted Jimmy is currently playing. For people who engage with Twitter in any other way, such tweets might feel a bit like spam and unlikely to do much for the stickiness of the platform, but perhaps decent marketing for the game in question.

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Many people have small followings of friends. I thought it was a nice way to easily share a funny gameplay clip. I don't post on Twitter to capture a mass audience and I don't think my friends considered in spam.

It was the lowest friction way to get screenshots off a Playstation.

Don't know about ps5, but you could use a usb stick for that, IIRC.

Fumbling around plugging and unplugging a USB dongle isn’t really low friction

For a while there were some really nice drives that had built-in wifi to share their contents over, but alas that market is mostly gone. Mostly sd-card, but in a pinch one can use a usb<->sd-card adapter with those.

I love the idea that the peripheral might itself have connectivity to a wider system. Kind of scary, but here for example it's such a useful handy feature. Keep shooting photos on your camera while also being able to have your phone or laptop reading photos off live: neat. Would be great here too.

This could be a neat usb-gadget project. Take an rpi and make it look like a usb-mass storage device. There's a neat subproject there, of reading files off the file with the fat32 partition on it that backs that drive, while the ps5 is still using it.

Whenever a new AAA title is out, the platform was flooded from clips taken from console. So yeah, it's used "that much".

I'm guessing this has to do with the pricing structure and the general change of direction of the X platform.

It was beneficial to both parties. Sony gets to advertise indirectly on Twitter and Twitter gets content and maybe a few new users signing up to post who might otherwise not bother signing up for Twitter.

For me, it was a pretty handy way to transfer screenshots off-device: post to private twitter account, log into twitter account on any computer and save the images :)

You can do that with the mobile app now, just FYI.

I guess it depends on your interest and followings. Just try using "Latest search" on Twitter with #PS4Share or #PS5Share and you can see that people love to share their gameplay.

Social sharing in general isn’t really used I’ve found. Case-in-point: Spotify Wrapped. The vast of the majority of the users just screenshot their phones instead of simply clicking a button to share on a platform.

Granted, it’s harder to do that on the Playstation but the alternative is just … not sharing it at all which probably is the case for most gamers.

I shared most of my clips to YouTube but I can definitely see prominent streamers using X.

It's a popular way for fighting game tech to be shared in the fgc

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