Twitter applied a ton of pricing changes around working with their API, and simply connecting users and offering an integration with it may not be worth their time considering the sheer number of users.
Accusing PlayStation of being the walled garden here is laughable considering Xs practices.
Yeah, I work for a company that offered a product that (among many other features) was used by medium-to-large institutional customers to post to and query Twitter… even getting a quote from X was a journey, but when it finally arrived it was a very very large amount of money for heavily restricted API access. We had to drop the feature. I wouldn’t be surprised in Sony was offered a similarly unrealistic quote.
>but when it finally arrived it was a very very large amount of money for heavily restricted API access.
I'm glad to see that X has taken this route, and I look forward to seeing the fruits of their ingenious business acumen. I hope they raise their prices even more.
To be clear, this isn’t Cambridge Analytica or spammer stuff. This was about publishing low-volume high-value content, and we didn’t have any sort of data gathering or analytics features.
> Twitter applied a ton of pricing changes around working with their API, and simply connecting users and offering an integration with it may not be worth their time considering the sheer number of users.
The first chunk of your comment provided a lot of useful context
> Accusing PlayStation of being [a] walled garden
???????????????????????? is this argumentative fanboyism really helping anyone here?
Did they add some way to sideload your own apps or do what you want with photos and videos on the device at some point while I wasn't paying attention?
This is why people hate walled gardens. If everything is some half-assed walled garden, your ability to do interesting stuff gets painfully curtailed.
Steam for example can also make these changes as they see fit. They aren’t required to support a 3rd party integration if it doesn’t suit their business. Sony is no different here.
I'm not sure how this is a Sony problem. Isn't it Twitter integrating pricing? I mean it would be one thing if Sony is scraping and downloading a bunch of shit, but if it is just uploading then shouldn't Twitter be encouraging that? Because it's a feature that helps users stay on __their__ platform?
I don't think it's really relevant here whether PlayStation is a walled garden or not. As other commenters have pointed out, Sony would have been paying Twitter for API access in order to provide this service to customers and they have no control over Twitter changing pricing or TOS - which was probably the reason for this feature going away.
Sony not giving you a way to easily extract your own data from the system is a consequence of it being a walled garden, but there's no onus on Sony to integrate specifically with other arbitrary third parties.
Twitter charges 42 thousand a month for enterprise API access. Why would Sony pay 500 thousand a year to make posting screenshots to Twitter slightly easier?
It has nothing to do with whether or not the PS5 is a walled garden or their feelings on Twitter as a platform. They liked it enough to add the feature in the first place, and when it didn't make financial sense, due to some highly questionable choices by the new CEO, they discontinued it. If Musk had any business sense he would have let them keep posting for free to drive up engagement, but he's obviously made some bad decisions and dramatically tanked the value of Twitter compared with what he paid for it so I can't speak to what drives his decision making process.
You still can easily post your PS5 media to Twitter, you just have to do it yourself instead of use the built in PS5 sharing feature. Much like most PC games that function without a dedicated Twitter sharing feature.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
The thing is, I almost get the change to Meta. Facebook had a family of products it had purchased/established and didn't want to just be known as the place where your aunt posted stolen election conspiracy theories when they were trying to get their "Metaverse" corporate rebirth off the ground. It didn't work, but I kinda get it.
The rename to X is different because it is Musk trying to make "fetch" happen. He convinced himself in the late 90s that "X" would be the ultimate website name despite a mountain of user feedback that it would, in fact, not be the ultimate website name. He's had a hyperfixation on it ever since. Now he's the richest man in the world after 20 years of artificially-low interest rates and incestuous relationships on Silicon Valley corporate boards, and no one will tell him it was a shit idea lest they lose their jobs or connections or because they've gotten as poisoned on the kool-aid as he is.
I'm on board with this. As users of the language, dictionaries look to us to determine what correct usage is. If we decide that Twitter is the word for the company that Elon Musk calls X, then we are correct (so long as there are enough of us doing so).
(Consignia was the name the Royal Mail (the UK Post Office) briefly, bafflingly adopted in 2001. Everyone completely ignored this, and they quietly changed it back a year or so later. The early noughties were _weird_.)
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 137 ms ] threadI don't even like Twitter, but this is yet another reason I stick to PC gaming.
Accusing PlayStation of being the walled garden here is laughable considering Xs practices.
Opinions are my own.
I'm glad to see that X has taken this route, and I look forward to seeing the fruits of their ingenious business acumen. I hope they raise their prices even more.
It's already too expensive which is why all the useful integrations have dropped off the platform.
Perhaps they've decided to cut off all bots so that only humans are left there
I have tons of crypto and NFT bot spam waiting for me every time I log back in.
The first chunk of your comment provided a lot of useful context
> Accusing PlayStation of being [a] walled garden
???????????????????????? is this argumentative fanboyism really helping anyone here?
Did they add some way to sideload your own apps or do what you want with photos and videos on the device at some point while I wasn't paying attention?
This is why people hate walled gardens. If everything is some half-assed walled garden, your ability to do interesting stuff gets painfully curtailed.
There was no accusation. It is merely a statement of fact.
Steam for example can also make these changes as they see fit. They aren’t required to support a 3rd party integration if it doesn’t suit their business. Sony is no different here.
Yes, but it's my computer and it is much easier for me to get the job done relative to doing it on some PlayStation, even without any help from steam.
Sony not giving you a way to easily extract your own data from the system is a consequence of it being a walled garden, but there's no onus on Sony to integrate specifically with other arbitrary third parties.
It has nothing to do with whether or not the PS5 is a walled garden or their feelings on Twitter as a platform. They liked it enough to add the feature in the first place, and when it didn't make financial sense, due to some highly questionable choices by the new CEO, they discontinued it. If Musk had any business sense he would have let them keep posting for free to drive up engagement, but he's obviously made some bad decisions and dramatically tanked the value of Twitter compared with what he paid for it so I can't speak to what drives his decision making process.
You still can easily post your PS5 media to Twitter, you just have to do it yourself instead of use the built in PS5 sharing feature. Much like most PC games that function without a dedicated Twitter sharing feature.
Did the Digital Markets Act incur any outcomes when this occurred?
But preventing twitter from being able to be accessed may not hold up.
Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta, Microsoft
And the act has never demanded that two companies must integrate with each other.
It is also true that companies don’t need to “integrate”. But they do need to make their services compatible with other third party apps.
Gatekeepers will need to open up various APIs.
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.
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'm guessing this has to do with the pricing structure and the general change of direction of the X platform.
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.
Like... no, dickhead, I don't care how much money you spent on the company. It's Twitter.
Renaming things is dumb, and it's time someone fell on a sword for doing it. Apparently the Sears Tower wasn't enough of a warning.
The rename to X is different because it is Musk trying to make "fetch" happen. He convinced himself in the late 90s that "X" would be the ultimate website name despite a mountain of user feedback that it would, in fact, not be the ultimate website name. He's had a hyperfixation on it ever since. Now he's the richest man in the world after 20 years of artificially-low interest rates and incestuous relationships on Silicon Valley corporate boards, and no one will tell him it was a shit idea lest they lose their jobs or connections or because they've gotten as poisoned on the kool-aid as he is.
Feel free to use Mandarin inflections if you wish.
(Consignia was the name the Royal Mail (the UK Post Office) briefly, bafflingly adopted in 2001. Everyone completely ignored this, and they quietly changed it back a year or so later. The early noughties were _weird_.)