alt Hacker NewsNot buying Sony products for having ads seems a little excessive. That being said, I don't spend much time in the menus, really, but from my experience they aren't very intrusive.
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.
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If I were leasing a device, ads might be acceptable. If I own a device, then ads are absolutely not acceptable. If the supplier is not making enough profit from the sale of the device and feels they need to sell advertising, then they should just increase the price, rather than sell space on a device they do not own.
A game console purchase is not a partnership, it's an I-own-this-device-so-you-fuck-right-off.
It's not excessive at all, it's the only conscious way to cast a vote against losing control over the way your games are presented to you.
> 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-...
The existence of ads isn't a huge deal.
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.
> Not buying Sony products for having ads seems a little excessive
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.
It's not just about the ads, as GP said, it's the user hostility.
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?