It's idiotic that I can see my friend's PS4 game time played on PS5 but he has no way of accessing that info

Last night my friend and I were talking about games on the phone and he mentioned that the thing that made him most jealous about my having a PS5 vs his PS4 Pro was that I could see game time played, because he really wanted to know how much time he'd put into Enter the Gungeon, one of his all time favorite games. It was then that we discovered that I could pull up his profile on my PS5 (logged in as myself) and if he permitted sharing I could see his game times. I ended up having to screen shot all his game times and send them to him because he really wanted this info.

Sony locking this functionality behind the PS5 is just insane. There's no reason for it and no explanation. It's not going to sell more PS5s it just makes people jump through hoops to get the information if they don't have it, and it's clearly something a lot of people want to know because all the major systems offer it right now.

Obviously this is not a huge deal but it's baffling and annoying, and it made my friend feel like a bit of a second class citizen for using the older hardware even though he can't get the new hardware AND he spends just as much on games as I do.

Sony is clearly still trying to sell games to PS4 users based on the fact that their major releases next year are getting PS4 versions. This feels like the opposite of Microsoft's attempts to make all Xboxes basically equal. They're specifically locking functionality behind the PS5 (trivial though that functionality might seem to some) for no actual reason.

I also don't understand Sony's idea on locking this functionality too.

There could be architectural issues that make setting it up on PS4 expensive to implement. Considering the difficulty around instituting name changes, this wouldn't surprise me.

@ginormous76: that would be some terrible software architecture and seems unlikely, but even then you could easily make it accessible on the web via the console’s browser. There are numerous easy tech solutions, and it’s a very Sony move to lock something like this behind a $500 machine that nobody can actually buy.

Sony isn't locking users out but most likely Sony has stopped developing the UX on PS4, it is a shame.

There should at least be a way to check this online, I mean Sony sends emails with your top games played every January.

Yeah, they do those 'your year in review' things on their website each Christmas. If they can take that data from the console, surely it can't be hard to engineer it into console firmware.

They totally could, they just don't have any incentive to back-porting it to the UI. Maybe they'll add it to the mobile app if they haven't already?

i can understand it still not being there cause it wasn't there to begin with , but what seems weirder to me is that it wasn't there from the jump when even pre-ps5 they clearly had the technology to track the playtime for ppl when they've been doing the year wrap-ups for ppl on the website. .. the more baffling thing than it not being on ps4 now that its on ps5 is not having it on the newly ( with ps5 lauch) PS app honestly ... i mean now That is just dumb

The resource of a console are finite! The OS and social features running in teh background need o take up as little system memory as they can so that the GAME can get most of teh resources. Making the OS not poll every single database and load into memory and display data that is not needed is not something they are going to do. Remember this OS has to run behind ALL of the games no matter what and provide the ability to take screenshots, record movies, email or upload the images or movies, etc. It has to know who you are, who your friends and content with multiplayer groups; meanwhile its update the Trophies you acquire. DOing all this at any moment it has to dump you back to the desktop while you are STILL play the game!

Yeah, I don't think seeing 'how much time your friend has spent in a game' is something they need to pritiostize.

@monkeyking1969: You are completely misunderstanding what's going on here. They are ALREADY TRACKING THIS INFORMATION VIA THE OS. I know this because I can see the information on my friend's game time via my PS5. So what you said has no relevance whatsoever and your rudeness when you failed to comprehend what's actually going on was totally unwarranted. Just like they don't keep all your trophy information constantly loaded in the OS while you're playing games but load it up when you want to look at your trophies they can do the same thing with play time. This is how it works on the PS5.

Having a thin OS to maximize system resources for gameplay has NOTHING to do with this. If it did then they wouldn't be tracking the information and loading it to their central servers. Which they already are.

You could have spent the time you took to upload an insulting image to read the post and actually try to understand it.