PlayStation 5 gamers need to learn this trick if they want to keep their controllers ready for action.
If you’re anything like me, you’re constantly dealing with flat controller batteries. It feels like every time I pick up my DualSense to play a new game, it always has one bar remaining because I forgot to plug it in the night before.
There’s something I’ve been missing though. A simple track that hopefully leads to less time charging and more time gaming - and I’d expect it’s probably flown under your radar in the exact way it flew under mine.
Turn. Your. Controller. Off. The PlayStation 5 DualSense controller can be manually switched off in the same way Xbox controllers can, via the home menu, and you can also turn it off by holding the PS button down for 10 seconds.
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It really doesn’t sound like much but just have a think about how long your controller is switched on for when you’re not even playing games. When I’m not gaming, I use my PlayStation 5 for YouTube, Amazon Prime Video, Netflix, and other streaming services which obviously uses the DualSense as a remote control. Unless you’ve got a setting switched on to automatically turn your controller off when it’s not in use, it’ll just be sitting there, burning energy while it’s not even being used.
Chances are you’ll even switch it back on whilst watching something to skip an ad, or you might leave it on while your console is installing or updating one of the games you’re trying to play.
Turning it off manually gives you greater control of how much battery life it’s burning, and should hopefully leave you gaming for longer.
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The other option is to fiddle with your settings to decrease the amount of time the controller should be inactive before it turns off itself, though that can be equally annoying if you have to keep switching it back on because you left it a second too late to grab it.
Like I said before, Xbox players have this luxury too, and it’s arguably even more valuable for Microsoft’s console as those controllers use actual batteries rather than a rechargeable, internal one. Hopefully the next-gen Xbox will ditch the batteries as I’m sick of having to change them.
Again it sounds like such a simple “trick” but it’ll save you hours of game time in the long run, so start manually switching off that controller when you’re not using it.
Topics: PlayStation, PlayStation 5, Sony, Tech