Following reports of the beta version of PlayStation 4 firmware 8.5 removing community support, Sony sent out e-mails confirming the feature will be going away early April.
Thank you for using the Communities feature on your PlayStation®4 console. Beginning in April 2021, this feature will no longer be supported or available on your PS4™ console. However, you will still be able to stay connected and enjoy messaging features and more on your PS4™ console and PlayStation®App.
Sony e-mail
While this news has a small section of the PlayStation community up in arms, it was a move long suspected by players.
In addition to new community support going away, along with the removal the mobile application, PlayStation 5 launched without the feature either. Systems launching with reduced features is nothing new, though it strongly suggested that something was bound to change with the program.
Even though some players have expressed disappointment with this choice, a good number cited problems with current communities that Sony understandably does not want to deal with. While this might be disappointing for some, there are hopeful comments that this might lead to deeper integration with popular chat service Discord, which does something similar to communities on mobile and computing devices.
Whatever the future holds, at least Sony confirmed this before just pulling the plug.
