Key recommendations
- The latest PS5 UI update appears to have replaced the background for Game Hubs with full-screen ads.
- 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 news system.
- This often means that Game Hubs now have ads in the background, sometimes for the very game that PlayStation users are trying to play.
Over the years, the owners of platforms like PlayStation and Xbox have become less and less thin in turning dashboards into piles of advertisements. Earlier this year, Xbox users began voicing their frustrations with full-screen ads when turning on their consoles, and while PlayStation users might have had a laugh at their expense, the PS5 is doing much the same now.
PlayStation recently released a new UI update for the PS5, which mainly targets Game Hubs, the screens that appear whenever you hover your mouse over a particular game on the dashboard. Before the update, they usually had a piece of game art or title screen to clearly show the game you were passing through, and some would set the mood a bit before you entered.
PS5's latest UI update annoys users with constant ads
This appears to have been changed with this latest UI update as full screen ads are now displayed in various Game Hubs, sometimes they even advertise the game you already own. A Twitter user named Alfredobofa have collected some of the worst examples from their console, as games like Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth and Elden Ring now display screenshots of praise, while Star Wars Battlefront 2 advertises more Star Wars games as part of the day Star Wars.
From what we can see, it looks like these huge ads can't be turned off, meaning PS5 users are now stuck with permanent ads on their Game Hubs. Game Hubs also seem to be pulling their backgrounds from the News tab on PlayStation, which is the reason behind the wildly different Game Hub backgrounds we're seeing right now.
That would also explain why older and smaller games are seemingly unaffected. For example, I installed The Plucky Squire and Nier Automata on PS5, but neither show ads. However, newer and bigger releases like Street Fighter 6, Final Fantasy 16 and Kunitsu-Gami show recent news. The more big builds you play, the more you will be affected by this change.
Understandably, this is causing a lot of ire among PS5 users, calling the update an “objectively terrible change.” Others lament the loss of the PS4's theme system, which allowed you to customize your backgrounds based on specific games. Why PlayStation decided to change this all of a sudden is a mystery, though it's possible it's some sort of bug. You'd hope so, anyway.
