Ads in a console which you paid for should be a big no regardless of not being an error.
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.
PS3 was peak modern console UI. No-nonsense, easy, clear, fast. Was so happy when I first tried RetroArch to find that their default simply copied the PS3.
The store was terrible, though. Their Cell “supercomputer” could play advanced 3D games, but couldn’t handle rendering a web store. Chalk it up to the amazing ability of web UI and JavaScript to make everything feel slow. They should have stuck with a native UI for that generation, I’d bet it lost them lots of sales. Practically unusable.
Unfortunately, the kinds of workloads Cell was good at had very little in common with what a web browser, especially of the time, needed. As always, it was a fascinating design incompatible with the needs of software and the market at large.
Oh? I really liked Xbox 360's "blades" dashboard UI. It was quite fast, and was quite simple. On every screen, there's a clear indication of what your controller buttons do, making it really quick to get around in. Some video of the dashboard in use: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1P5gTvXct30
The blades UI was quick, but I remember so many slow loads when pressing the Xbox button and pulling up the system menu.
But I do agree, the blades UI design-wise was pretty good and achieved far more information density than the crossbar PlayStation UI. But when in-game I wouldn't describe any of the UI as speedy.
I dunno what UI the 360 had by the time I got one (maybe after the One was out? Or just a little before) but 90% of every screen is ads.
It was fine before. I think they changed it to the current abomination when PS4 launched?
The store was originally a native app for the first couple of years. Whenever the Ribbon UI went to the one with sparkles, the store went to a crappy web UI that was unbearable to use.
I love seeing bits and pieces of the original UI that were clinging on by necessity, namely the firmware upgrade screen. It was likely made immutable at the cost of UI updates.
> It was fine before.
Relevant PA: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/03/02/joy-and-joy-un...
The PS4-alike redesign was definitely way way worse though.
I had one way before the PS4 and never found the store usable. Super slow, apparent OOM crashes resetting scroll state, all kinds of pain, for years prior to the PS4.
That one? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HOO6xg254A Maybe it wasn't best thing from usability perspective but I don't remember performance problems with it.
I had the same exact problem with my PS4. Having ads in the console is not a problem per se, the problem is that Sony can unilaterally decide to Alter The Deal without me having any recourse. It should not be acceptable business practice to do this.
>>It's a far cry from the awesome, snappy and easy to use Vita bubbles interface.
Oh god, I didn't even think anyone could ever say such a sentence. After years with XMB on PS3 and PSP, the Vita's interface felt like a bit of a joke imho - I remember opening my Vita on launch day and literally thinking this is just wrong, I even googled if there's any way to change it to XMB interface.
It was easy to use, sure, but it was just....too much. And once you had several games it just became a complete mess. The menus themselves were ok though.
Not buying Sony products for having ads seems a little excessive. That being said, I don't spend much time in the menus, really, but from my experience they aren't very intrusive.
Playstation has some of the most immersive single player experiences available today, on any platform. For the older gamers, who can't stand playing multiplayer games, the PS5 has been incredible.
It's not just about the ads, as GP said, it's the user hostility.
If I buy a console from them, every day they could decide that they deserve to wring even more money out of me, through more and more intrusive ads and dark patterns like described above.
If I buy a game from them, every day they could decide that I won't be able to play it anymore tomorrow, like they tried with Helldivers 2 and Linux users.
If I finish a game from them, when releasing a sequel they could decide that I won't be allowed to finish the story because players simply must log into their unnecessary social network which isn't even available on all platforms, like they did with GoW Ragnarok and Linux users.
Why should anyone accept this?
> Why should anyone accept this?
Idle pleasures trump most people's weak principles and self-respect.
The existence of ads isn't a huge deal.
The existence of a backdoor into a console where arbitrary payloads not always in Sony's control can be pushed is a huge deal.
Therefore, the existence of ads on a purchased platform is a canary in a coal mine for enshittification.
> Not buying Sony products for having ads seems a little excessive
Right, I don't buy Sony products because they secretly installed rootkits on their users' machines which introduced security exploits, and then denied this fact, and then when forced to address it they just hid the rootkit better while also introducing a new rootkit that also harvested your personal information and introduced new exploitable security vulnerabilities of its own: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...
Don't be surprised at Sony's behavior. They're a sociopathic hypercorp, and just like all the other sociopathic hypercorps they'd grind you into a fine paste to make a dollar.
This article reads with the tone & pacing of AI slop.
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...
I agree; AI wrote a good portion of that. Keep standards high and don't reward this kind of content.
Sony didn't intend for everyone to respond so poorly, so they will delay the rollout of the ads.
Was supposed to go to a canary group, wasn't supposed to annoy the piss out of every single user for at least 2 more weeks.
They're not a new feed of ads, which makes me believe it is a bug. It's just showing the most recent item of that game's news feed. That's usually patch notes, new season announcement, sometimes an ad for something related.
In normal behavior you see the same content by pressing the down button once.
I am so glad i sold my ps4 and instead of getting ps5 gotmyself a steam deck. Life is so much more fun with free multiplayer, cheap games and open source linux.
This article shows one ad per paragraph of text, reproducing the experience for us readers.
They wanted to give you the full experience of what they reported on
It was showing the latest item from each game's news feed. Publishers are free to show whatever there, some show patch notes, in-game events and some use them to promote DLCs/sequels/related media. Some of these are "ad" like.
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.
There have always been ads in the PS5 interface if you're connected to the internet and logged into your account. I fully expect they'll add more ads in time.
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.
So gross. How much do they really make per month from each customer who sees these kinds of ads? Can I just pay them an extra $10/yr to _never_ show me an extra ad?
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?
> Can I just pay them an extra $10/yr to _never_ show me an extra ad?
You already paid for the damn console, why on earth would you even remotely entertain that idea?
Please do not give them that idea. I still haven't gotten over Sony charging $60 a year to give you the privilege to play online with your friends.
Soon it'll cost $150/yr to play a modern console like you should be able to
I still can't believe this practice was normalized, why would anyone be ok with paying Sony/MS to use their own internet connection they already pay for? It's not like an MMO sub where you're paying for server maintenance or something, most of these games are p2p or running on the publisher's servers. Console gamers will put up with anything apparently (maybe because their parents are paying for it)
Agreed. Console online services provide no value whatsoever, it is pure "pay me because fuck you". It blows my mind that people were willing to pay for Xbox Live Gold back in the day. Though of course once Xbox proved people were willing to pay for what should be free, it was only a matter of time until everyone copied Microsoft.
> It's not like an MMO sub where you're paying for server maintenance or something
Those matchmaking and auth services and what not are absolutely being hosted and managed by the console's online networks.
Maybe the actual match gets hosted p2p, but the overall matchmaking, NAT punching, etc is all being provided by game platform.
True but those costs should be more than covered by the cut they get from psn/xbox store purchases. Steam manages to provide those services without charging their users for it. Come to think of it i bet the bandwidth needed to download games from the psn store (typically 30-100+gb a piece) is probably more costly than any of the multiplayer services they lock behind a subscription
Steam's matchmaking services are far more limited than Xbox's.
Also, very few Steam games are sold outside of Steam. How many Xbox games are sold by other vendors like Walmart/Target/Bestbuy/Amazon/GameStop?
Take the TV off the network, then plug something you can actually control into the HDMI port and call it a day. Smart TVs without flagrant user hostility are apparently a lost cause
Advertising is a virus that will infect all ecosystems.
This seems just a plausible deniability game (pun intended) mega vendors like Sony and Microsoft like to play, to see what they can get away with, and if backlash occurs, simply say "opps" and remove it.
It's just yet another "dark pattern" to these companies in general to abuse their market positions.
I really hate it when a feature I didn’t develop manages to get into my prod environment…
This isn't the start of the design problems.
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.
Showing ads for things you already own, and this tech companies want to track us more because the ads would be "better".
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.
My gameboy pocket and SNES show no ads. Gaming peaked in the 90s, and has been downhill since.
I've found that Game Boy games are usually not very good.
I bought an Analogue Pocket machine and downloaded an archive of ROMs from archive.org and the only game I've found myself playing from time-to-time is Tetris.
Am I missing out on something? I've tried the Pokemon games but even those seem... well... boring.
The Wario Land games are fantastic. Kirby is good. Mario Land might hold up? There's three Zelda games on the Gameboy Color that are worth playing as well. It's honestly not the strongest lineup of games, but there's some bangers.
The Pokemon games were revolutionary at the time but they have all been remade at this point. I'd recommend Heart Gold or Soul Silver, if you don't like those you'll never like Pokemon.
> Am I missing out on something?
A Pokemon game? Is it at all similar to Pokemon red/blue/yellow because those didn't appeal to me at all.
PS4 and PS5 have produced the greatest single player games of all time. Nostalgia can be a strong influence.
Which you can only enjoy right after you finish creating your Ubisoft account. Or your EA account. Or your Bethesda account. Even though I want a single player experience. And if I refuse to create an account, I am unable to pay for the game I just paid $60 for.
All of that on top of a console that is constantly showing me ads and forcing me to login somewhere.
This behavior is ridiculous. I cannot believe that Microsoft/Sony do not put a stop to it and at least require a seamless integration with the console username. Optional (real optional, not 90% gameplay locked) account created with the game company.
Those publishers are for sure not producing "the greatest games of all time." You'd find those reqs even sooner on PC where you have to install their own store app, too
Even with nostalgia goggles on, PlayStation 1 and 2 easily had more good games than SNES and Gameboy Pocket.
SNES has some absolute gems and a fairly deep library of legit good games, but most Gameboy games are barely better than most NES games and rarely hold up to anything even in the next generation of handheld Nintendo games.
Worth considering the size of the console libraries. PS2 was releasing games forever and had a mammoth catalog. By sheer numbers you would expect more gems.
If I were to make a list of greatest single player games of all time there would be very few PS4 titles and absolutely no PS5 titles.
I don't have the time,the budget or the hard disks to bother with trying them out.
You say this, and yet I re-played Deus Ex a month ago on whim and it was still probably better than 100% of all games in PS4/PS5
Look, the word "better" has no meaning here. This thread is pointless unless those involved are discussing specifics and acknowledging personal preferences.
Anyway, Bloodborne is a PS4 exclusive masterpiece and it would be absurd to suggest that it doesn't approach the level of quality of games in the 90s.
> Look, the word "better" has no meaning here.
Agreed with this here. One might as well argue vanilla is just better than chocolate, absolutely fact, nobody could argue otherwise.
Not technically exclusive anymore, emulation has caught up to it.
I like most immersive sim games. However, the market does not seem to like them. They are very hard to make and get right, but the RoI is mostly cult following.
If you liked Deus Ex, you might also like Dishonored and Prey.
PS: I would love to build an immersive sim if I get enough time, but I know for sure that it would just be a labour of love, like a painting which may or may not sell.
Prey and the Dishonored series are up there, for experiences of that sort. Go in blind to Prey if you can.
Though I played those on PC, not PlayStation.