PlayStation Communities on PS4 Shutting Down in April

Sony is preparing to shut down its PlayStation Communities feature on Playstation 4 next month, in seemingly one of the first moves by the company to gradually drop support for its older console.In a note on the PlayStation Support page, Sony says that PS Communities will no longer be supported beginning April 2021, though messaging and other features will still be available through the PlayStation App.

PS Communities is a feature that lets PS4 users create or join groups based on interests. The groups are able to play games together or discuss their interests via message boards on the system. The feature was launched in 2015, and had already had its winding down signaled last year with the ability to create private communities removed — though public communities were still open.

With the launch of the PlayStation 5 last year, it makes sense that eventually, Sony will slowly begin to withdraw support for different PS4 features — though given how many PS4 units are out there, it’s likely that the process of the PS4’s wind-down will be a slow one. For comparison, the largely unsuccessful Wii U only just lost its Netflix support earlier this year, despite the Switch celebrating its four-year anniversary a few weeks ago. So don’t expect to lose the console’s more meaningful features anytime soon.

All that said, this may also be more of a move to get rid of Communities entirely, as there is no equivalent feature available on PS5 at this time.
Rebekah Valentine is a news reporter for IGN. You can find her on Twitter @duckvalentine.