Have you ever watched clips of video games online? I’m sure you have. That’s why Twitch exists. It’s a ton of fun to watch clips of other people playing video games on PS5, Xbox, or PC, especially if something shocking or funny happens.
However, sharing gameplay from your console isn’t always easy, depending on the console that you’re playing on. My friends and I noticed that, after years of playing together on Xbox and sharing game clips with each other, there was one thing missing from this experience.
A couple of friends and I usually play video games together online at least a couple of times every week, and when we do, we hop into a party chat. Up until a month ago, we exclusively played games online on Xbox instead of PlayStation. While the game captures work great on Xbox, we were always bummed that every clip we recorded was missing the audio from our party chat.
There are so many clips where something crazy happened in the game and we would be screaming or laughing that was completely lost on the clips we shared with each other. We all talked about how every one of these clips would be a lot better if we were able to capture the party audio along with the audio and video from the game itself.
However, Xbox doesn’t natively support this. In order to capture our party’s audio on Xbox, we’d need to use a third-party platform like Discord or a capture card — neither are things that we wanted to bother with.
PlayStation enters the chat
Then, Helldivers 2 came out. If you’re not up to speed with this game, it’s currently only available on PlayStation 5 and on PC through Steam. So, we all bought PlayStation Plus for the first time (at least it was the first time for me) so we could play that game online together.
As I was getting used to how multiplayer works on PlayStation versus Xbox, I noticed something in the settings of our party. Buried in party chat settings was the ability to — my god — record the audio from both your and your friend’s microphones for recorded game clips and broadcasts.
This was the feature we have been dreaming of for years on the Xbox and here it was the entire time on the PS5. We could finally record all of the ridiculous audio from our party chat on the game clips we were sharing with each other.
Here’s how to do it:
With this new knowledge (it’s honestly not that new; this feature has been out for quite a while), we started talking about how we might start playing other games on the PS5 as well. We play Battlefield 2042 and Red Dead Redemption 2 a lot together, and both are available on the PS5. There are years of game clips from these games on Xbox that are missing what I’m sure was hilarious party audio. Maybe it’s time to start playing those on the PS5 so we can start capturing that?
I’ll need to touch base with my friends on what they want to do about that since it does feel a little ridiculous to buy a game all over again on another platform for the sake of including party audio in-game clips. But, with Battlefield being $10 right now on the PlayStation Store, I imagine that might not be as ridiculous as it might sound.
Imagine if Xbox lost our group to PlayStation over this feature — that would be really stupid. So, come on, Xbox — let’s get that natively built-in to the Xbox Series S and Xbox Series X! You’re years behind on this one, and that’s not acceptable. You launched online multiplayer on consoles with Xbox Live, you should be leading here!
