A change PlayStation 5 players noticed that caused promos for YouTube videos, game ads and patch information to display on PS5 game title screens was a bug, and it's being fixed, the company said late Monday.Â
Players scrolling through their game library noticed a major change to the system's interface: gone was home screen art when you hovered over a game title. Replacing it: patch information, news updates, and in some cases, advertisements for other games from the same publisher.
A September update to the PlayStation 5 operating system appeared to have changed the way game title screens display information. As a number of gaming sites pointed out (and CNET confirmed on several titles with a PS5), art from each game was swapped out with information apparently pulled from each game's news feed.
But the problem wasn't intentional, Sony says; instead, it was a bug that the company says is already being fixed. As of this writing, some titles on a PlayStation 5 we tried such as Star Wars: Outlaws had reverted to their original state. In a post on X, the account AskPlayStation said, "A tech error with the Official News feature on the PS5 console has since been resolved. There have been no changes to the way game news is displayed on PS5."
This followed up a since-deleted post by Sony senior product manager Daniel Hiatt advising PS5 owners: "Everybody settle down; it's just a (new) bug with an existing feature."
A representative for Sony didn't respond to a request for comment.
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Before the fix, titles such as Marvel's Spider-Man 2, for instance, showed on its title page a video roundtable of some of the game's developers as its main art. The art for Black Myth: Wukong, a recent big hit, showed a background image behind information about the game's latest patch notes. Star Wars: Battlefront 2 II included ads and pricing for other Star Wars games.
While the new title screen art and information weren't ads for, say, Tide detergent or Nike, they could still be considered promotional material and a major visual change. The new look drew criticism on news sites and Reddit from gamers who thought that Sony might be introducing ads and promotional content into its user interface.
While the September update added new features such as 3-D audio profiles and Party Share, it also appeared to have removed a Resume Activity function that, according to PlayStation Lifestyle, only worked intermittently before it was taken away.
This story was originally published on Sept. 30 at 12:22 p.m. PT and was updated at 4:15 p.m. PT with information from the AskPlayStation account.