Quality of controls: 5/5

Ease of setup: 5/5

Time to set up: 2 hours

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The Set Up

We locked ourselves into a room to get everything ready before Christmas. It took under an hour to unbox and plug everything in, then an hour to arrange the accounts and parental controls. Overall, everything was simple and easy! Having gone through this with the Nintendo Switch and streaming services, the PS5 gets huge points for its simplicity and flexibility.

Need to know

You need a separate email account for each PS5 account. So for all four of us to play, we connected the PS5 accounts to four different email addresses. Even if a guardian doesn’t plan to play, you need an account for the controls.

Each player can choose a pin in order to play or not. We gave a pin to ourselves and to our oldest, because his younger brother has a bad habit of using other people’s accounts to play games. Nothing can be changed in the console itself without a Family Manager or Parent/Guardian‘s pin.

Controls available

• Which games they can play by age
• How long they can play each day
• If they’re allowed to spend money and what is the limit
• If they’re allowed to communicate
• Who they’re allowed to communicate with
• When they want to play a game that’s not on their approved list, they can request to play. The request goes to a Family Manager or Parent/Guardian‘s email and/or a notification pops up in the app. It’s simple to approve or deny.
• Each control is easy to edit at any time, so you can change their time or games with a quick edit.
• It’s easy to see not just how long your kids played, but which games and how far they got in each one.

Conclusion

We’re very happy with everything involved in the PlayStation 5 controls so far. I don’t anticipate having any problems until our kids decipher our passwords! But they also know that we can see any changes they make, so deceit isn’t worth it.

They don’t need to play with anyone outside of our family yet, but those kinds of controls look just as user friendly.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to play more Sackboy: A Big Adventure!

Photo/Image Credit: Sony Playstation 5

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