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”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.