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    PS5 New UI Update Also Brought Ads You Can’t Turn Off and Unwanted Forced News Feed to Select Titles
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    PS5 New UI Update Also Brought Ads You Can’t Turn Off and Unwanted Forced News Feed to Select Titles

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    20 Comments

    1. chrisdh79 on

      From the article: Just this month, Sony rolled out a new PS5 system firmware update that introduced the Welcome Hub alongside other features. One of good things about the Welcome Hub is that players can customize what they see in it, and you can even configure preferences that will prevent ads from showing up.

      However, it seems there is a limitation to that, as even if you opt out of ads, you will still see various news related items cluttering your dashboard that are either ads, or basically what Sony wants you to see.

      Based on our testing, it indeed does happen. One example is Horizon, and hovering over it shows an ad for LEGO Horizon Adventures:

      The ad also make sit confusing a bit, as based on the screenshot above, it looks like you’re playing LEGO Horizon Adventures and not the actual Horizon game we’re on.

      It seems players will see will be different based on each game. So it can be an ad for one game, and maybe a news bit for another one.

    2. WordNERD37 on

      My brain is so trained to ignore ads, of any kind, I didn’t even know there were ads until I saw this headline. A lifetime of being under assault by ads has created a people completely immune to advertising. I seriously do not notice them any more.

    4. MolotovMan1263 on

      It doesnt matter much as its still a regression, but some context is important.

      Before, when you hit down on a games tile, you were presented key art for each game.

      The change that was made is that instead of key art, you are shown an image associated with the latest Game News update for that particular game. This information has always been there, it was just deeper down the tree.

      Now, what this has resulted in is in some cases, and ad for DLC, another game, etc is now present here. In other words, it will be as egregious as the Game News articles were prior.

      What the DOES NOT mean, at least today, is that if you hover over say, Astro Bot, you will see an ad for Call if Duty, or Mountain dew, or something unrelated.

      TLDR: Still sucks, but so far its all contextual to the game, not unrelated ads…yet.

    11. Gardakkan on

      Don’t buy a fucking PS5 Pro, send them a fucking message. Stop acting like mindless fucking drones and say enough is enough! You don’t need a console to live, make them change 1st. We have no leverage when they see everyone is still buying them. Unless you like bending over for corporation dick?

    13. Fallout-with-swords on

      This is very likely a bug or at least something devs will choose better background for going forward. This is a feature that has existed for a bit that devs could choose to show the “latest news” as the game background. When used properly you would have different game related HD background like with GT7 or Helldivers 2 with a little blurb on a new patch. Which I think was fine because it still looked nice.

      What happened yesterday is now every game is pulling the most recent “news” post for that game and making it the UI background. Now every dev uses the news feed differently and obviously some are essentially ads for the game or the games sequel or something else related to the game like a YouTube video and it looks really bad as background.

      So hopefully someone pressed the wrong button and turned this feature on for everyone or this is a new mandate and hopefully devs just use better images to accompany the news. It feels like something they should be able to pick and choose like add a new post to the game’s news feed but there is the option to highlight a post as the UI background.

    15. DarXIV on

      I was just telling my wife the other day how nice it was that my PS5 didn’t shove ads down my throat.

      Guess the mic on the controller was listening, sorry everyone.

    17. Amazo616 on

      I took so many screenshots when I played spiderman on my new ps5 – and tried to put them as the background ….. sigh…..

    18. Voting101 on

      As a pc gamer that has been thinking about getting a PS5, this headline has solidified me into not even considering a PS5 in the future.

    20. Speeider on

      Will PiHole block these ads? If so, you should get it. Even if it doesn’t, you should get it anyways. My Internet experience is so much better now with it.