Party chat on PS4 may be doubling, if an upcoming test by Sony is a success. The platform-holder announced today that users can sign up to beta test 16-person parties, up from the current limit of eight.
Over on Xbox One, players can have 12-person parties, a quantity Microsoft bumped up from eight in 2015. (Note that you can currently invite 15 people to an Xbox party, a feature we haven’t tested and only have seen reports that the max is 12)
If PS4 winds up supporting the biggest party group, that’ll be quite the turnaround from the previous generation, when the Xbox 360 supported party chat and the PS3 did not. At the time, Sony cited the system’s memory limitations for the lack of that feature.
Sony is also testing a new accessibility feature that would turn party chat to text on the PlayStation mobile app and would also convert typed text to speech. Xbox One has this feature among its suite of options. On either platform, the feature would allow more people to communicate with each other.