Sony really wants you to know God of War Ragnarok is out

God of War Ragnarok is now out on PS5 and PS4 — a simple message that Sony might be promoting a little aggressively, according to a screenshot from a PS4 owner's home screen.

God of War Ragnarok and its day one patch are now firmly in the hands of eager PS5 and PS4 players — unless their parents are holding the disc back as a Christmas gift, we suppose. If you're a God of War fan and the bonkers God of War Ragnarok ads haven't reached you by this point, you're likely either outside the target demographic for Sony's marketing push for Ragnarok or you have done such a solid job muting keywords to avoid God of War Ragnarok spoilers that you're not even reading this right now. For the rest of us, Kratos' latest adventure just might not be our jam, though even Kratos can't help you when Sony turns your PlayStation into a God of War Ragnarok marketing machine — which was certainly the case for one fan.

Being Dad Ragnarok.

God of War Ragnarok ads are flooding certain PS4s

A Resetera user posted a screenshot showing that, despite already owning their own copy of God of War Ragnarok, their PS4 home screen had not one, but two back-to-back God of War Ragnarok advertisements on it from Sony. The Resetera user opened the thread in the hopes of finding a way to turn off advertising on the PS4 home screen (there's no such option, unfortunately) and to dispatch a very reasonable accusation: "There's no system in place to track player purchases when a hot new release drops to avoid cluttered UI situations like this?"

Most users in the replies were simply baffled, as it depends on where your account is registered as to which kind of advertisements and reminders you will see. In the US, where regulation on advertising is considerably laxer than elsewhere on Earth, it's not only PS4 users who will see ads for games like God of War Ragnarok on their home screen but also PS5 users who will see full-screen ads every time they start the console via the 'Explore' tab. For those living in regions without this feature, 'Explore' is a tab on your PS5 home screen that functions a little like the 'What's New?' social feed on the PS4 — except instead of focussing on what trophies your friends just won, it focuses on selling you stuff. One user over on GameFAQs even got an ad on his PS5's Explore tab for the PC version of Days Gone, which feels extra useless.

Hmm, what shall I play?

Not all players living in all regions will be exposed to advertisements and reminders from Sony the same way — here in the UK we definitely get our fair share of sales alerts on both PS5 and PS4, and on PS4 we can recall a time when a banner for Genshin Impact was quietly sitting next to all the games we actually owned. That said, we've yet to see individual game ads on our PS5, and we don't have any equivalent to the Explore tab as of yet.

It's hardly fair to single Sony's practices out here — after all, Microsoft's Xbox consoles have had loud ads on the home screen since the Xbox 360, and anyone who has ever owned a Nintendo 3DS and prefers to keep their home screens neat and organised will have already gone mad from the constant deluge of junk half-downloading itself onto your precious digital space. It's just something that continues to irk people about their PlayStation consoles — especially when it's implemented as poorly as this double Ragnarok advertisement.

PC? Oh boy!

All this to say — yep, this really is just the world we live in. Somedays it just draws more attention to itself than on other days, though fair dues to the Australians and the Canadians who, as far as we could tell, seem to have the least cluttered PlayStation consoles out there. With this minor issue off your collective dockets, perhaps you'd rather sink your teeth into yelling at Sony about how Kingdom Hearts has made PS Plus Premium seem like even worse value than it already was. Otherwise, let us know in the comments what kind of ads you see, and if you've been enjoying collecting those God of War Ragnarok trophies under all that clutter.

More God of War Ragnarök stories:

PlayStation 5 PlayStation 4

Written by Lee Brady

Staff Writer Lee keeps one eye on the future (Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, Metaphor: ReFantazio), one eye on the past (PS Plus Premium news, PS3 games), and his secret third eye on the junk he really likes (Final Fantasy 16, Sonic the Hedgehog). Then he uses his big mouth to blurt out long-winded opinions about video games.