Sony Is Removing PSN Leaderboard Support For PlayStation Mobile

Posted by Chris K on April 25th, 2014 | 8 Comments | Tags: PlayStation Mobile

Sony announced today that the PlayStation Mobile scoreboard service would be shutting down on June 30, 2014. This service allows PlayStation Mobile developers the option to include leaderboards in their titles which link to a PlayStation Network account. The reason given by Sony for this was that the service will be shut down due to limited usage. I have embedded the statement left on the developer portal below.

Dear PSM developers, Due to the limited usage, we will be closing PSM scoreboard service on June 30, 2014. If your PSM Application uses the service, please delete the scoreboard function and re-submit your application as soon as you can. (Note: If your PSM Application uses an external scoreboard service, no actions are required.) Once we close PSM scoreboard service, it is unable to access PSM scoreboard service. Also, we are afraid, but we cannot provide any technical support such as transfering data from PSM scoreboard service to another scoreboard service. We are deeply sorry for the inconvenience, and truly appreciate your understanding.

As you can guess many developers are not pleased. From our talks with developers it seemed that the service was hard to implement to begin with and little to no support other than some limited examples was offered. Many developers were also quite upset at the fact that Sony is asking them to remove the scoreboard code from their games and resubmit.

Oh man 🙁 Looks like online leaderboards are going to have to be removed from Nunnageddon – and every other PSMobile application it seems. — Daniel Scales (@DanielCake) April 25, 2014

Seems a bit ridiculous to me, as high score boards was one of the most requested features for Nunnageddon when I asked around online. — Daniel Scales (@DanielCake) April 25, 2014

@psnstores Yeah – extremely annoying. I wasted time implementing them, now I have to waste more time removing them… — Mike Oliphant (@NostaticSoft) April 25, 2014

@psnstores Rather poor form but nothing surprising considering how buggy the leaderboard stuff is to develop for. — Richard Pilot (@RichardPilot) April 25, 2014

Leaderboards were a big part of the PSM roadmap post launch. This removal of such a large feature in my eyes does not bode well for the health of the platform. That is unless Sony is allowing access to leaderboards with Unity. I reached out to Sony to see if developers would have the option to include PSN Leaderboards with any projects that are currently using the Unity engine preview, but as of reporting I have not heard back.

Did you play any games that featured leaderboards on PlayStation Mobile? What do you think this means for other sought after features like trophies? Let us know in the comments below.

[Source: PlayStation Dev Portal / @PSMDevSupport]