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PS5 themes: Can you customize your homescreen?

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There’s a lot to love about PS5, but it’s missing one key feature from the old PS4 — themes. On the old console, themes were used as a way to customize your homescreen and were often inspired by iconic games or beloved characters. Unfortunately, themes aren’t available on PS5, though Sony has implemented a cool new feature that modifies the background as you browse your collection of games.

Here’s a comprehensive look at how you can customize your PS5 homescreen and whether you can change its background.

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Does the PS5 have themes?

Ratchet and Clank on the PS5 home screen.
Image used with permission by copyright holder

As mentioned above, the PS5 does not have any themes. Instead, whenever you highlight a game or app on your home screen, the background will change to art related to that game, as well as show more information on it. While far from ideal, it is the closest we are likely to get to the themes we had on our PS4.

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Can you change the background on a PS5?

Again, due to the PS5 dynamically changing the background depending on what you’re currently looking at, there’s no way to alter your background at this time. Since the background is constantly changing, even if you had a custom image, it would always be changing as you cycled through games. There are a few other ways you can customize your PS5, however, unless Sony gives us the option with an update, there’s no way to set a theme on your PS5.

Browsing through and uncovering the hidden PS5 features will give you other ways to make the console your own, though. From setting custom button assignments to booting up your console from your phone or tablet, and even controlling it using your voice, there’s a lot of different ways you can interact with the console that aren’t enabled out of the box. We’ve created a list of the best PS5 tips and tricks to help you get started on your personalization journey.

While it’s unfortunate that you can’t use themes on PS5 or change its background, the use of dynamic backgrounds as you flip through your gaming catalog is a nice alternative. There’s no denying most players would love to have more customization options for their console — after all, themes were incredibly popular on PS4 — but watching the dashboard change as you view different games is a nice change of pace.

It’s unclear if Sony will add themes to PS5 in the future, and so far there’s no word that the feature is in development. The company has rolled out new features since the console launched in 2020, so there’s hope that themes will one day make their way to the new-gen console. Until then, you’ll have to make do with its dynamic backgrounds.

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Jesse Lennox
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