PS5 players angry at the scourge of new home screen ads

Earlier this month, Sony has launched a new firmware update thatamong other things, added a customizable home hub to the PlayStation 5 home screen. It’s quietly one of the the best new features the console took years, but it’s overshadowed by an equally frustrating change that resulted in a bunch of random garbage, including ads, being on players’ screens whether they like it or not.

The Home Hub is the new start tile in the PS5’s main menu and lets players choose what’s displayed, from controller battery life to discounted games on their wish list. PlayStation Store. It also allows players to disable an optional newsfeed widget that displays random ads for any games they follow. Unfortunately, this news feed now infects the rest of the console’s home screen.

Thumbnails for installed games previously displayed background images or activity cards when hovered over them, but following a recent change, they now rely on the last item in that game’s News Feed. Sometimes the results are harmless, but other times it means everything from YouTube thumbnails to marketing for other games takes over the screen when you select specific games to play.

“So it turns out that the recent PS5 UI update that allowed you to turn off all ads on the dashboard was too good to be true. » tweeted user Earl Turlet over the weekend. “Now ALL GAMES on your home screen show an ad in the background with no way to remove them lol. » YouTuber Mystic I also made a full video guide players through the changes.

The most egregious examples include a “What is Warhammer” video for Warhammer 40K : Space Marine 2the Spider-Man : Miles Morales page displaying a promotional image of Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse released over a year ago, and awards posts that cover the art of a game with review scores and testimonials. Sometimes the news feed shows a completely different game, like Horizon Zero Dawn: Complete Edition on PS4 whose background art now appears Lego Horizon Aventures instead. “This is a huge degradation of the user interface,” wrote a player on Reddit calling on others to protest the changes. “Anneau d’Elden is advertising a mouse pad, dammit.

Hopefully Sony reverses this change. Ideally, players would be allowed to customize the games’ backgrounds, like they can on the home hub, choosing from official artwork or even their own screenshots. And if some players want quick access to news feeds for matches, they could do that too. for finding games, maybe Sony can do a better job displaying what they select. In many cases, a simple list of the latest official titles from the PlayStation Blog or social media accounts for those games would be far more useful than the way the feeds are currently constructed.

The news feed issues are a bug according to PlayStation senior product manager Daniel Hiatt. It sounds like it will be fixed soon.