An “accidental” PS5 update introduced intrusive ads for a day and it was awful

It’s no secret that nobody likes to see ads, and that’s why streaming services charge extra for viewers to skip them completely. While the internet and cable TV are full of ads and commercials, your gaming console has typically been a safe space to avoid them, but even that’s changing. The latest firmware update for the PS5 had a bug, at least according to Sony, that introduced ads that automatically appeared on players’ screen. The ads showed up automatically on individual game pages, and while the update was live, there was no way to turn them off. To Sony’s credit, the bug was fixed quickly, but I couldn’t help but feel like this was a frightening glimpse into the future.

Ads have typically been limited to the explore tab, but for a brief moment, we saw them in far more places, and it wasn’t a fun experience. While you can still easily load up a game and ignore whatever’s being advertised, it’s still annoying to see something other than the game’s key art. It’s especially a problem if the ad being shown to me is wildly out of date.

As an example, I looked at all three of the PS5’s Spider-Man games and two FromSoftware games to see what was being pushed at me. It seemed like it varied depending on the game’s age. Not every title had ads, and it looked like the newer the game was, the more likely it’d have ads.

A peek behind the curtain

Not everything is intrusive yet.

While the update was live, I looked at all three Spider-Man games to see how the ads were being used, and the results were interesting. The oldest game, Spider-Man: Remastered, had nothing going on as it just showed the game’s logo and nothing else. For Spider-Man: Miles Morales, there’s an ad promoting Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, a movie that came out over a year ago. For Spider-Man 2, it showed me the second part of a roundtable, so that wouldn’t be much help even if I were interested.

It’s an overall strange assortment of suggestions, considering the Miles Morales advert doesn’t even have anything to do with the game itself, but it’s instead banking on me being interested in following the character of Miles Morales. In this case, it’s accurate, as Across the Spider-Verse is a very good film, but that’s not the point. The ads all appear to be something officially uploaded by the developer, so a random video from a YouTuber wasn’t anything to worry about.

I also looked at Demon’s Souls and Elden Ring, and a similar situation played out there. It seemed like it didn’t matter if it was a first-party game or third-party, the ads showed up all the same. However, Demon’s Souls didn’t have an ad of any sort, while Elden Ring showcased an accolades trailer. It’s tough to tell how the system worked, but the two oldest games I checked didn’t have any ads being shown to me. Even if you opted out of ads through the Welcome hub, you’ll still see these show up. They aren’t to the level of booting up a sports game like NBA 2K and being bombarded with ads prompting you to buy things, but it’s still annoying to see a console I spent hundreds of dollars on pushing ads. You have to wonder if this was some sort of test gone wrong for Sony because there’s certainly precedent for ads to be implemented like this. All you have to do is look over at Microsoft to see an example of how they are using ads.

Xbox has already blazed the trail

They are here to stay.

Disconnecting your PS5 from the internet was the only way I could see to remove the ads, but that meant I couldn’t play an online game or use any streaming services. That’s obviously not a solution for most people to use their consoles, so there was no way to avoid them for a brief moment in time. The silver lining was they only showed up on a game page, so you could load up a game and not have to think about them again.

Even more annoying than the mere presence of the ad was the timeliness (or not) of what was being automatically loaded to display under specific games. The Spider-Man: Miles Morales ad is already an example of a poorly-timed ad, considering it’s promoting a movie that’s more than a year old. There’s no telling if that will ever be changed, so loading up Miles Morales years from now could still show that same ad promoting the second movie of a trilogy. It’s not the end of the world by any means, but it’s just an annoying trend of ads becoming more and more invasive despite how much we try to avoid them.

After a lot of backlash online, Sony revealed this update was actually an accidental release and reverted it. However, there might be more to the story. Ultimately, Sony adding ads in that manner isn’t all that different from what Microsoft is pushing with their consoles. The Xbox Series X|S consoles have ads showing up directly on the home page, and that’s been going on for most of the year. Despite pushback, Microsoft has gone full steam ahead, so Sony may have thought they could get away with the same thing. Whether it was truly a bug or if Sony saw the outrage, the ads are now gone. As we see from these gaming juggernauts, most recently with the removal of the disc drive from the PS5 Pro, it’s only a matter of time before they do something else to upset the players.