How To Make Your PS5 Home Screen Less Cluttered With Nonsense

PS5

If you’re like me, you might love your PS5 but hate some of the changes made to it from PS4, including the new UI. I have complained about it before, with the home “Explore” page that many (but strangely, not all) players are greeted with when they log in.

This is essentially a giant news feed ad for a given series of games, some of which you may own, some of which you may not, or haven’t played in a long time.

But there is a way to get your home screen less cluttered with all of this nonsense, or at least make it more relevant to what you actually want to see.

While unfortunately, there is still no way to fully disable the explore page or to make your last game played your default opening screen, I will give full credit to Kotaku for finding something I probably would not of realized in a million years.

Your news feed is based on games that you “follow” and you can “unfollow” any game you don’t want to see there. Did you download Fortnite one time to appease your little cousins over Thanksgiving and don’t want to see every new skin bundle in the store? Well, there’s a fix for that.

PS5

There are two main ways to go about this. The first is that you can click on any “news card” in your feed, and find a three dot menu next to the game. This allows you to “unfollow” that game, as you will be following a ton of games by default, even if you didn’t opt-in to this system in the first place. This way can be tricky however, as if the card is a trailer, it will begin autoplaying if you click it rather than take somewhere you can unfollow it.

The second way is going to take a lot longer, and means you have to go into your library, click on each game, go to the store page and unfollow the games individually. Not every game you own or have ever owned will be auto-followed, but my hunch is that some may just not have enough current updates to warrant a news feed appearance at all. But most of my owned games were followed by default when I checked.

I don’t know what happens if you unfollow every single game you can because I haven’t had time to go through them all yet. My guess is that it might just start giving you randomized games instead of showing a blank page or something, so that might be even worse. My best advice is to pare your follow list down to only the games you might actually care about or see in your news feed. For me that’s probably things like Destiny, Avengers and Fortnite, given what I’m currently playing on PS5. But no, I don’t need every Call of Duty update or Miles Morales special featurette to show up there.

I maintain this is a bad system, executed badly, and no matter what you do, if you have the explore page it still makes your PS5 home screen look like a giant ad. I just want the last game I played to be my home, but that only appears to be an option for some regions that don’t have the explore page at all, for whatever reason. We’ll see if this changes at all in time.

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