PS5 Guide – What are Accolades and how to earn them

Sony want to recognise their best PS5 players.

As we’ve seen throughout our extensive PS5 coverage, Sony’s dominant position in the market have allowed them to take some fairly unexpected risks, pushing the boundaries of gaming with the DualSense controller, superfast SSD, and an overhauled user experience have helped this generational leap feel more dynamic than the previous one.

 

We’ve discussed some of the PS5’s new and revised features already including Activity Cards, and PlayStation trophies, but one area that hasn’t been discussed is the Accolades system.

Power on your PS5 console, sign into the PlayStation Network, and you’ll be able to see an Accolades section on your player profile – select your player icon from the top right corner, then select Profile and you’ll find accolades in the cards alongside trophies, your full game collection and friends list. This will presumably be visible to other PSN users, so long as your privacy settings are relatively open.

So what does this do? Luckily, Sony have provided a handy explainer on exactly what this new feature entails:

What are Accolades?

Sony explain:

You’ll meet players who contribute to the community and embody PlayStation’s ideals. To help encourage our best members and recognise positive influences, you can anonymously give someone an accolade after an online match. The accolades you receive are displayed on your profile.

Accolades come in three variations including Helpful, Welcoming, and Good Sport.

How to earn Accolades?

In online matches with random matchmaking:

  • You can give one accolade per match.
  • You can only give accolades to players who aren’t your friends.
  • You can only give one accolade to the same player within 12 hours.

With many online PS5 games not yet live or lacking players, we’ve yet to fully test this feature and so can’t see how Accolades will actually appear on your profile.

Sony are definitely attempting to make the PlayStation Network a friendlier space for gamers, but are also taking precautions to prevent the Accolades system from being abused. On one hand, this could mean that they simply see there being a value to earning Accolades, or maybe those who have enough of them will be entitled to certain rewards…

We’ll be updating this guide during the PS5 launch week with our findings.


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Senior Editor bursting with lukewarm takes and useless gaming trivia. May as well surgically attach my DualSense at this point.