“Everybody settle down”: After a PS5 update dropped ads all over the home screen, dev says it’s “it’s just a (new) bug with an existing feature”

If you’ve turned on your PS5 in the past day or so, you’ve likely seen a whole lot more ads on the home screen than you’re used to, with promotions for upcoming games, various trailers, and bits of developer news taking the place of the custom game art that typically appears when you select a game on that menu. Don’t panic, though – according to PlayStation, this is a bug, not a feature.

Each PS5 game typically features a custom, hi-rez background image that appears whenever you hover over that game’s page on your home menu. Yesterday, players began to notice that this art had been replaced with what amounts to ads, seemingly pulling from a publisher news feed that’s sometimes quite thoroughly out of date. It’s annoying, but apparently it’s very much unintentional.

“Everybody settle down; it’s just a (new) bug with an existing feature,” PlayStation senior product manager Daniel Hiatt says on Twitter. Hiatt doesn’t explain exactly why this bug suddenly appeared or when it’s getting fixed, but at least it’s not supposed to be this way, and Sony’s aware of the issue.

PS5 got its new ‘welcome hub’ as part of a firmware update earlier this month, and it’s likely this is in some way tied to that rollout – but given that it’s taken this long for the weird behavior to manifest across the home screen, there’s likely more to it than that. There certainly wasn’t any mention of a change to the news feed in the official announcement. Here’s hoping this all gets fixed soon.

PS5 Pro doesn’t come with a disc drive because Sony says it’s “giving players choices,” like the choice to spend $80 extra to play the physical games “most players” have.