I only ever turn my PlayStation 5 off a few times a year, and it’s usually when there’s an unexpected power outage or I accidentally hit the red switch on the power strip it’s plugged into. My PS5 yells at me when I turn it back on and I vow never to do it again. Apparently only about 50 percent of players live this way, however.
The other half actually hold down the home button on the DualSense controller and tell the console to turn off whenever they are done playing. This is nuts. Absolutely sicko behavior. Sony may have won the console war but there are clearly millions of degenerates within its ranks. The revelation comes from a recent interview with console interface designers at Sony and how player habits informed their choices when creating the new Welcome Hub.
“We had an internal hypothesis that far more people would put their console into rest mode than would fully shut it down each time between their play sessions,” Cory Gasaway, VP of Product, Game and Player Experiences at Sony Interactive Entertainment, told Game File. “As it turned out, it was actually about 50/50 between the two options between all our players. So, what that meant was for about 50 percent of our users, when they booted up, if they were in the U.S. they were landing on our ‘Explore’ page, and if they were outside the U.S. they were landing on the game page for the last game that they have played.”
For people like me who just put the console into rest mode, starting it up again puts you right back into whatever game was last being played. Others—roughly 32.5 million, to be exact—were landing on woefully boring home menu tabs. The Welcome Hub added last year fixed that by adding a bunch of customizable widgets that immediately share cool info about things like console storage, DualSense battery life, and wishlist sales.
It’s all part of an ongoing effort within Sony to “have more shortcuts” in the console that “reduce the number of clicks” for players to get to what they need, as well as surfacing features and functionality they might not have been previously aware of. Gasaway also told Game File that decoupling some of the user interface from system-level software updates has helped it speed up the number of tweaks and updates it pushes out every year.
Hiromi Wakai, vice president of product management at Sony Interactive Entertainment, also recently shared another interesting insight with Game File about PlayStation fans. It turns out the heaviest usage for the PlayStation Portal cloud gaming handheld comes at around 9:00 p.m. each day, about an hour after peak PS5 usage hits. “This could suggest scenarios like users playing on the console first, then later switching to PS Portal to play in another room—courtesy of PS Portal’s characteristics like the ability to play in another room—while their family is using the TV,” Wakai said.
The PS Portal has also been getting updates in response to the real-world usage data coming in. Launched as a remote-play-only device, the $200 accessory can now play a growing number of PS5 games directly through the cloud without needed a local console to connect to. It might never become a full-fledged portable gaming device, though. Bloomberg reports that Sony is currently working on one of those separately.
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