Wow, this is awful. Some people reported that these ads are also very petty and not necessarily related to the game, like apparently Elden Ring shows an ad for a licensed mousepad when you hover over the game now...

Edit: Playstation Product Manager says this is actually a new bug. I really doubt it but they do seem to be "fixing it".

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[–] roguetrick@lemmy.world 11 points 4 days ago (1 children)

By the sounds of it, Sony isn't even getting paid for these ads. They're replacing the art with shit like a video explaining what the universe is. It's just an algorithm they put in to keep it "fresh" and it's amazingly shitty.

[–] MrScottyTay@sh.itjust.works 4 points 4 days ago (1 children)

It's not an algorithm, it's just the latest news for the game. The news feature has been a part of ps5 since the beginning. This is replacing key art with the picture for the news article/video and the title replacing the games logo.

[–] Blackmist@feddit.uk 4 points 4 days ago (2 children)

I'll accept it's a bug tbh. There's no money in this.

Seems like it's auto selecting the first "news" thing for the game rather than leaving it on the default game splash screen.

[–] MrScottyTay@sh.itjust.works 1 points 4 days ago

I think it is intended behaviour, but it's not meant to be a system wide thing. I can see this being useful for multiplayer and live service games.

[–] roguetrick@lemmy.world 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I think the end goal may be to monitize the news feed, but overall the news feed sounds like it's so poorly designed that nobody would want to use it in the first place. Being Japan, maybe the news feed was some high ranking dickhead's pet project and they got this "feature" pushed through without anyone actually having the guts to say it was idiotic.

[–] Blackmist@feddit.uk 2 points 4 days ago

Not sure how much you can monetise the news feed for a game you already own... The publisher may already control all the things linked to it. If unmonetised things are "ads" now, then the whole Steam UI is a giant ad.