PS5 Dashboards Flooded with Unwanted Ads–Sony Claims It Wasn't Intentional

I can't be the only person who thinks Sony's interface design is just plain hostile. I've used a PS4 as a media machine of sorts for a long time, mostly for Youtube. I recall being able to pin used applications in the past but you can't do that anymore. You need to go to the media folder where you are presented with their current streaming offers and need to scroll down to YouTube or Plex.

It's a far cry from the awesome, snappy and easy to use Vita bubbles interface. Combined with forcing PC users to log in with their PSN account to play offline games and I'm simply not buying anything from this company anymore.

Edit: coverage with better reporting & screenshots of the problem: https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/30/24258693/ps5-update-news-..., https://www.ign.com/articles/ps5-homescreen-now-replaces-uni...

My Roku TV just pushed a new channel to my home screen, alongside a giant vertical ad on the right, an advertising wrap for the UI, and multiple ads in the screensaver.

I just want a "smart TV" that can run Jellyfin, YouTube, and a handful of streaming apps, without showing me any ads or spying on me. What do I do?

Knowing what a mess development is, especially games development, it's fairly easy to imagine this being an unfortunate incident where there wasn't proper integration testing done which might have caught this. There's no obvious benefit to showing years-old patch notes for games, so it seems pretty clearly unintended.

For now all of the ads go away if you log out of your PSN account. You can even leave your PS5 disconnected from the internet entirely although I've had games refuse to launch while offline because they insisted they needed an update that hadn't been downloaded yet.

My biggest complaint with the system is still the controllers which are designed to break after a year or two and cost $80 to replace. That and not allowing people to copy game saves to an external hard drive so they can push people to pay for their cloud save service.

It's just yet another "dark pattern" to these companies in general to abuse their market positions.

I was sad when I bought a PS5, and saw what a design mess they'd made of the home screen UI. And it didn't grow on me: I still feel dislike, every time I use it.

At first glance, it looked like a combination of letting biz dev take over the UI, plus siloing the work of multiple designers on the skeleton around that, so that there was no coherent overall design, nor intuitive user conceptual model.

Worse, I rarely even see the iconic (in two senses of the term) Sony icon bar now.

(Which iconic bar, incidentally, I understand they've also shrunk the active icon for in a PS5 update, presumably to make more room for ads and the piles of noisy Times Square "engagement". Plus they made it modal, perhaps for more ad space, so there's two bars, and a clumsy way to get between them, depending on whether you want games or video streaming.)

But I don't even see the main iconic bar(s) anymore, because the UI usually leaves me in the ugly alternate "lower" bar, which doesn't even have a cue that the main iconic bar exists.

(Which, incidentally, you might not know you can get out of with a long press, not a normal press, on the logo on the controller. Which logo, incidentally, in previous consoles, used to look like a button.)

This lower bar you're stuck in by default has an annoying and surprisingly ugly recent-task-switcher-like interface that's especially ugly and clumsy to use, with submenus you don't want there.

Also, turning off (rest mode) console running Netflix, when going to bed, used to be quick muscle memory with the TV controller. Now it's an extended interactive adventure.

Then there's the Web version of the PlayStation store getting more unusable with each re-design. If you can find what you want, there's pretty obviously a flaky underlying data model with a lot of special cases, and the UI has never sufficiently abstracted over that, nor reliably. Even every PS+ monthly release is a coin-toss of what time it will be pushed, in which UIs, and with a good chance of bugs in that process.

C'mon, Sony, we really want to love you, but you make it so difficult. The "Play" in PlayStation should be for fun and relaxation. And when we game, our controller and overall the UX should be a "elegant weapon" of the hero. Not aggravation, bureaucracy, and the impression of being bent over for every jerky marketing program. It's like you're subconsciously making a WorkStation for an especially toxic and dysfunctional company.

But when Sony shits on the users I am not surprised they get a lot of shit back, greedy assholes.

As an opposite examples I allow GOG to send me emails with promotions, because they are not scum company I can tolerate looking trough the email and see what is new or what has a discount if I am in the mood.