I love gaming clips. Funny clips. Cool clips. Clips of glitches, impossible headshots and cool stunts. I look for them all the time to feature on my show Highlight Reel. But finding them is difficult, and it just got worse because Sony announced it’s disabling the ability to share from your Playstation 4/5 to Twitter (I have not, nor will I ever, call it X) directly. That sucks! And it’s making an already dire landscape for gaming videos even worse.
First, some caveats. You can still download clips to your phone via the PS App (it’s not bad!) then upload that video to Twitter pretty easily. There is also precedent to this move: Xbox removed the ability to upload directly to Twitter earlier this year, and Playstation used to have the ability to upload to Facebook directly before everyone realized that Facebook video was the most miserable, least-sharable platform in the history of the internet. Nintendo, as of this writing, still lets you upload directly to Twitter from your Switch. You have options.
So practically speaking, video is not entirely dead on Twitter. But the reality is that the internet is currently a very bad place to find and share gaming clips, because the places you would easily share clips are suddenly getting aggressively worse, tools are being depreciated and there is no alternative in sight. Twitter’s faults are obvious. Reddit, meanwhile, remains the other ideal place to find and share gaming videos within communities. But it has never really recovered from its recent rapid deterioration. Subreddits for new games are popular, sure, but there is nothing keeping the communities together any more, and the popular ones of yesteryear are desolate ghost towns.
YouTube should be a great place to share clips (it’s got some of the best compression of any free platform), but YouTube has always chased longer-form content, and the short-form content it is chasing is Shorts, which are trying to ape Instagram and TikTok. Meanwhile Twitch, despite being seemingly tailor-made to be a great place for clips, does not seem interested in pushing the clipping feature at all, and if you look at a top down view of the most-viewed clips of any week, it’s pitiful. You are far more likely to see a Twitch clip on Twitter, TikTok or YouTube than on Twitch. Discord is actually not a bad place to share clips between friends, but Discord remains a series of closed communities. For what it is, it’s perfectly fine, but it’s no replacement for a real and transparently open social media platform.
I have no idea what went into the decision to remove the ability to post from PlayStation to Twitter. Maybe Musk tried to shake them down, or maybe Sony just decided to cut costs, saw that Twitter is currently a smoking hole in the ground full of scams, racists, and fleeing users, and decided it made more sense to just focus on their app. Who knows? But there are more than enough compelling reasons for Sony to not want to be tethered to the sinking ship of Twitter.
It’s a pity. While Twitter has never been a great place for video from a compression perspective (every video on that site looks like a bad .avi file), or even from a content creation perspective, it was and still is a great method to share videos, one not as closed off and aggressively tailored as Instagram and TikTok. What made it so useful for me personally was that you can use real search operators, including filtering by source, so if you wanted to you can get a raw feed of every single Playstation video uploaded in chronological order, filtered by the number of likes and retweets. By removing the ability to upload from the app, that source operator is now gone. RIP #PS5Share.
Of course, the big elephant in the room for video is always TikTok, which has been sucking up the ambient views of every other platform, but TikTok has always only been an ideal place for TikToks. It aggressively prioritizes content optimized for it, and gaming moments in 16x9 aspect ratio are not that. The same algorithmically dominated mindset applies to search: finding anything specific on there is impossible, unless it also happens to be a thing tailored to TikTok that it wants to show you. TikTok has the potential to be great for gaming. But more often than not it’s simply annoying memes, not gameplay.
Of course, my perspective here is informed by the fact that I have searched for videos for my show for approaching a decade, and that people will always find a way to share noscopes and videos of NPCs turning inside-out. But places on the internet don’t die, they just get worse. Cory Doctrow’s concept of enshitification applies here. Every place on the internet that you would share a clip of you doing something cool in a video game has fallen apart, with no solid alternative in sight.
I think a lot about the Share button on the Dualshock and DualSense controllers. As time goes on, it feels more and more quaint, a product of a sillier time when there was a lot of misplaced enthusiasm about the potential of the internet, along with a lot of loose and unsustainable money driven by 0 percent interest rates. Maybe they should drop the pretense and call it a “capture button.” Or maybe they should just leave it as a reminder of a time when the internet sucked less in the hope that, one day, it can point directly to a place worthy of sharing.
