PS5’s Best New Feature Overshadowed By Scourge Of Unblockable Ads [Update]

Earlier this month, Sony rolled out a new firmware update that, among other things, added a customizable welcome hub to the PlayStation 5 home screen. It’s lowkey one of the best new features the console has gotten in years, but it’s being overshadowed by an equally frustrating change that’s resulted in a bunch of random junk, including ads, getting splashed across players’ screens whether they want it or not.

The welcome hub is the new starting tile on the PS5’s main menu and it lets players choose what’s displayed, from controller battery life to discounted games on their PlayStation Store wishlist. It also lets players turn off an optional news feed widget that pulls random announcements for all of the games they follow. Unfortunately, that news feed is now infecting the rest of the console’s home screen.

Tiles for installed games used to display background art or activity cards when you scrolled over them, but following a recent change they now pull from whatever the latest item is in that game’s news feed. Sometimes the results are harmless, but other times it means anything from YouTube thumbnails to marketing for other games takes over the screen when selecting specific games to play.

“So it turns out that the recent PS5 UI update that let you disable all the advertisements on the dashboard was too good to be true,” tweeted user Earl Turlet over the weekend. “Now EVERY SINGLE GAME on your homescreen shows you an advertisement in the background with no way to remove them lol.” YouTuber Mystic also put together a thorough video walking players through the changes.

The most egregious examples include a “what is Warhammer” video for Warhammer 40K: Space Marine 2, the Spider-Man: Miles Morales page showing a promotional image from Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse which came out over a year ago, and accolade posts that plaster the art of a game with review scores and testimonials. Sometimes the newsfeed shows another game entirely, like Horizon Zero Dawn: Complete Edition on PS4 whose background art now shows Lego Horizon Adventures instead. “It’s a huge downgrade for the UI,” wrote one player on Reddit calling for others to protest the changes. “Elden Ring is advertising a mousepad FFS.”

Hopefully, Sony reverts the change. Ideally, players would be allowed to customize the backgrounds for games just like they can on the welcome hub, choosing from official art or even their own screenshots. And if some players do want quick access to the newsfeeds for the corresponding games, maybe Sony can do a better job of displaying what they curate. In a lot of cases a simple list of the latest official headlines from the PlayStation Blog or social media accounts for those games would be a lot more useful than how the feeds are currently constructed.

Update 9/30/2024 4:41 p.m. ET: The news feed issues are a bug according to PlayStation senior product manager Daniel Hiatt. It sounds like it will be fixed soon.