Don't panic! Those awful changes to the PS5 home screen were just a bug

The PS5 Home screen.
(Image credit: Sony)

If you booted up your PlayStation 5 over the last few days, then there’s a chance that you saw something pretty horrifying. I’m of course talking about the big ugly, blown-up promotional art that was dominating every game icon that you hovered over on the home screen.

Although some speculated that the issue, which seems to have caused the images associated with the latest news posts for each of your games to appear in place of the usual background art, was a cynical attempt to push promotional content on users before the launch of the PS5 Pro, it turns out that it was just a bug. 

According to a new post on the official Ask PlayStation X / Twitter account, “there have been no changes to the way game news is displayed on PS5.” The post also states that the situation arose due to “a tech error with the Official News feature on the PS5 console” and that it “has since been resolved”.

I just booted up my PS5 to verify this and it does indeed seem like everything is now back to normal. This is certainly a big relief as this was a very aesthetically unpleasant problem. Many of the images that appeared by mistake were incredibly low resolution or filled with hard-to-read text, ruining the rather pleasantly minimalist look of the PS5 UI. 

Sony recently announced a huge PS5 update that introduces customizable home screens, though this hasn’t rolled out to everyone yet. There’s a definite chance that this bug had something to do with the implementation of this new system.

Elsewhere, the company announced and officially revealed the PS5 Pro. PS5 Pro pre-orders are open right now, though stock appears to be quite scarce. We also saw the reveal of 30th anniversary PS5 and PS5 Pro designs plus some special edition accessories, though these sold out in a matter of minutes when pre-orders opened last month. 

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Dashiell Wood
Hardware Writer

Dash is a technology journalist who covers gaming hardware at TechRadar. Before joining the TechRadar team, he was writing gaming articles for some of the UK's biggest magazines including PLAY, Edge, PC Gamer, and SFX. Now, when he's not getting his greasy little mitts on the newest hardware or gaming gadget, he can be found listening to J-pop or feverishly devouring the latest Nintendo Switch otome.

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