PlayStation bug showed what gamers really think of ads | Kaser Focus

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 The ads were often outdated or irrelevant to the user — especially given they usually owned the games in question.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.