Sony has quietly announced that all of the online and multiplayer features of 2015’s Everybody’s Golf will be taken offline permanently in September. This will make some trophies impossible to collect, though the game’s singleplayer and offline modes will remain playable.
As spotted by Gematsu, if you check out the web page store for Everbody’s Golf on PS4, you’ll see a new notification warning players that on September 30 “all online features (including online multiplayer modes) will cease on that date.”
Gematsu has compiled a handy list of all the online features that will “cease” come October 1. It’s not a short list!
- Open Course selection
- Participation in International Tournaments
- Turf War
- Checking the latest Daily Ranking
- Checking the latest Copy Ranking
- Partial viewing of the Notice Box
- Partial browsing of This Month’s Items
- Partial browsing of Last Month’s Items
- Purchase and use of Warp Medals
- Acquisition of some items related to fishing
- Reporting of players
- Viewing of latest Profile Card plus number of times copied
- Partial browsing of the Library
- Acquisition of the Platinum Trophy “Push it to the Limit!”
- Acquisition of the Gold Trophy “Walking Encyclopaedia”
- Acquisition of the Bronze Trophy “Online Debut”
Everybody’s Golf launched for PlayStation 4 in August 2017 and was developed by Clap Hanz. The studio has been making arcade-y golf games for over two decades now, with the earlier games in the Everybody’s Golf series being sold over here as Hot Shots.
Fun fact I just discovered today: Camelot developed the original game in the series before moving on to do the Mario Golf games for Nintendo.
Kotaku has contacted Sony about its plans to end online support for this game and that means for similarly older PS4 games with multiplayer features.
While some may celebrate the fact that this somewhat niche game was able to have servers supported for over five years, it’s still a sad thing to see online features in a game killed. Thankfully, at least this time, folks are getting a good six months of prep time to grab any trophies and have some last matches with online pals. However, it does make me nervous about other, older PS4 games and how long their servers will remain.