Sony Finally Brings Friend Logon Notifications To The PS4, Somehow Manages To One-up Everyone Else

It’s hard to believe that a gaming platform could exist today without the functionality to notify you when a friend comes online, but up until its 3.50 beta system update, Sony’s PlayStation 4 has been on what’s sure to be a small list. Sony gave fans a chance to sign up for the beta last week, and those who were accepted into it would have received an email yesterday. I was one of those who did, so I decided to waste little time in jumping in to check out all of what’s new.

In the beta release notes, Sony details two features that many will consider long overdue: offline mode and friend online notifications. The benefits of offline mode are obvious; sometimes it’s nice to hop on and chill out alone, or just take care of something quick without the worry of leading friends to believe that you’re sticking around.

The latter feature is the real star of the show, though. While notifications of friends coming online is nothing new, Sony has somehow managed to improve-upon every other implementation I’ve seen. How on Earth could that be possible? Check it out:

“Friends you specify” is what’s important here. While most systems will notify you when anyone on your friends’ list pops online, Sony’s take on things lets you cut down dramatically on notifier spam by letting users pick and choose which friends should be on that list.

With this feature, gamers can pick and choose relevant friends for games they’re playing at that particular time, choose only real-life friends, or, if you’re OK with constant notifications, you can simply “Select All” and go about things that way:

With the 3.50 update, Sony took a stupidly-common feature and made it better. It wouldn’t be surprising to see this kind of functionality leak to other platforms in the future.