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.
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.
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.
I think FW update splash is not running the full OS and it only displays static image for simplicity, XMB never used static image as background.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Idle pleasures trump most people's weak principles and self-respect.
A game console purchase is not a partnership, it's an I-own-this-device-so-you-fuck-right-off.
Can you even insert second hand disks into consoles anymore or is it all online?
I don't feel that this invalidates my previous point, though.
> Playstation has some of the most immersive single player experiences available today, on any platform.
Playstation is struggling hard, same as Xbox this generation. PS5 has like 3 exclusives, two of which are Fromsoftware RPGs you can emulate and the other one is probably some censored Senran Kagura rerelease (I genuinely forget what it is). Xbox doesn't fare much better, and both OEMs are scrambling to publish on PC after their own sales slump hard enough to justify laying off entire studios[0] or pulling games a week after release[1]. It's downright pathetic compared to the halcyon days of the PS3, and enough to make the PS4 and Xbox One years look at least... competitive. The two big console manufacturers are lame ducks doing their best to avoid each other, and fostering exactly the sort of lock-in they need to promote recurring service revenue and blatant advertising onto their users.
It's just a harsh fact of the gaming industry, right now. Everyone wants to be Nintendo, but nobody has the money to invest in their studios that they bought up during the last generation. Now we get Concord and Starfield as next-gen consolation prizes, lucky us. If the trend of studio layoffs continues, the AAA games industry is going to go anemic.
[0] https://www.pushsquare.com/news/2024/06/xbox-explains-why-it...
[1] https://ftw.usatoday.com/2024/09/concord-shutting-down-sony-...
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.
In normal behavior you see the same content by pressing the down button once.
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.
Though I played those on PC, not PlayStation.
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.
Agreed with this here. One might as well argue vanilla is just better than chocolate, absolutely fact, nobody could argue otherwise.
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.
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.
All of that on top of a console that is constantly showing me ads and forcing me to login somewhere.
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.
There's always GBA though if the original handheld versions seem too primitive.
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.
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...
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.
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.
I’m curious to see the implementation. If there’s a break in do I have to sit through a 30sec ad before I can interact with the app to see what’s going on?
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?
Soon it'll cost $150/yr to play a modern console like you should be able to
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.
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?
You already paid for the damn console, why on earth would you even remotely entertain that idea?
It's just yet another "dark pattern" to these companies in general to abuse their market positions.