PlayStation bug showed what gamers really think of ads

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Earlier this week, many gamers were shocked to turn on their PlayStation 5 consoles, only to be confronted with a dramatic change to their dashboards: Usually, each game’s icon on the dashboard has a piece of art from that game as a background. Instead, they saw full-screen promotional news posts and advertisements for the game (or sometimes sales in which that game featured) as backgrounds instead. The ads were often outdated or irrelevant to the user — especially given they usually owned the games in question.

PlayStation quickly rolled out a fix and assured users this was a bug introduced in a major update, not a change in its advertising strategy. However, mistake or no, it also offers a glimpse into how players would respond if PlayStation actually rolled out a change such as this. Needless to say, they weren’t happy. The biggest complaint on sites like X and Reddit was that there was no apparent way to disable this despite the PS5 having a setting to turn off ads. Some users went so far as to say these full-page promotional images put them off of using their PS5s entirely.

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The second biggest was that the ads and news shown in the new display weren’t relevant and often months out-of-date. Users pointed out that this would prove especially bothersome when playing older games, as these promotional posts might include spoilers or just be comically old. But for the most part, users who noticed this change were clear: They didn’t want intrusive ads on their dashboards. Despite this being a bug, it could prove to be valuable as a case study if PlayStation ever did consider rolling out fullscreen dash ads.

In personal news, I’ll likely still be catching up on September’s games before the October releases — such as Silent Hill 2 Remake, Metaphor: ReFantazio and Dragon Age: The Veilguard — start to show up. That being said, since it is the spooky season officially, I might try my hand at Zoochosis, an atmospheric indie horror title that cropped up online.

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