Summary

  • PS5's latest UI update appears to have replaced the background for Game Hubs with full screen advertisements.
  • Games like Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, Elden Ring, Space Marine 2, and more are replacing their Game Hub backgrounds with the latest post from the PS5's news system.
  • This often means that Game Hubs now have adverts in the backgrounds, sometimes for the very game that PlayStation users are trying to play.

Over the years, platform holders like PlayStation and Xbox have been getting less and less subtle about turning our dashboards into piles of advertisements. Earlier this year, Xbox users began venting their frustrations with full-screen adverts upon booting up their consoles, and while PlayStation users might have been laughing it up at their expense, the PS5 is pretty much doing the same thing now.

PlayStation recently released a new UI update for the PS5, mostly targeting Game Hubs, the screens that display whenever you hover over a particular game on your dashboard. Before the update, they would usually have a piece of game art or the title screen to clearly display which game you were hovering over, and some would set the mood a little too before you hopped in.

PS5's Latest UI Update Is Annoying Users With Constant Adverts

That now appears to have been changed with this latest UI update, as full screen advertisements are now displayed across various Game Hubs, sometimes advertising the very game that you already own. A Twitter user called Alfredobofa collected some of the worst examples from their console, as games like Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth and Elden Ring now display accolade screenshots, while Star Wars Battlefront 2 advertises multiple Star Wars games as part of Star Wars day.

From what we can see, it appears as though these giant advertisements cannot be turned off, meaning PS5 users are now stuck with permanent ads on their Game Hubs. It also appears as though the Game Hubs are pulling their backgrounds from the News tab on PlayStation, which is the reason behind the wildly different Game Hub backgrounds that we're seeing at the moment.

That would also explain why older and smaller games are seemingly unaffected. For example, I have The Plucky Squire and Nier Automata installed on my PS5, yet neither are showing off advertisements. However, more recent and bigger releases like Street Fighter 6, Final Fantasy 16, and Kunitsu-Gami are showing off recent news. The more big releases you play, the more affected you'll be by this change.

Understandably, this is causing a lot of annoyance among PS5 users, calling the update an "objectively terrible change." Others are lamenting the loss of the PS4's themes system, which used to let you customize your backgrounds based on certain games. Quite why PlayStation has decided to change this all of a sudden is a mystery, though it's possible this may be a bug of some kind. You'd hope so, anyway.

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