As all science fiction movies predicted, we are quickly approaching that time in our lives when adverts are on every screen you see.
Unfortunately, the latest screen to take a step into the dark side is the PlayStation 5 home screen.
After the latest system update, hovering over a game on your home screen will no longer show some stunning imagery from the game but instead will display “official news” related to the game you’re looking at. In most cases, it’s almost as if you’ve just typed the game’s name into the YouTube search bar, and whatever video popped up first will be shown.
While some of it does seem relevant to the title in question, like Hell Divers 2 showing off their latest Chemical Agents Warbon, others seem to want to suck me into a YouTube black hole for hours. Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth shows a video of Danny Trejo reacting to his character in the game.
Many others are reporting cases of games advertising early access to games that are over a month old, like NBA2K25, and Dragons Dogma 2 advertises a free-to-play trial period, perhaps to coax you into getting your friends to play alongside you.
The worst part is that there is currently no way to disable this setting on the PlayStation 5, which means Sony is forcing you to see whatever content they want you to see, and nobody likes that.
We know adverts have been a thing on the PlayStation Store for a few years now, but that’s to be expected. When a game you’ve already purchased starts forcefully advertising itself more and more to you, it can leave a bitter taste in your mouth, which might just make you switch back to Netflix.
Not all hope is lost, though. The official NA Support account over on X has reported that this new feature is in fact, a bug.
A tech error with the Official News feature on the PS5 console has since been resolved. There have been no changes to the way game news is displayed on PS5.
— Ask PlayStation (@AskPlayStation) September 30, 2024
The post says that the issue has already been resolved, but since then, the PlayStation Network has gone down, meaning many of us have not seen the fix. Oh, and you know, you can’t play any online games, purchase anything new or even change your account details. Typical gone down kind of stuff.
Seems like the official news bug was maybe a little bigger than PlayStation was expecting.