A month before the release of the PlayStation 5, Sony released a video showcasing the new “user experience” for the console. It was, as you might expect, slick and well crafted. Dozens of new features and changes were designed to “be completely centred around you”.
New user interfaces are an odd aspect of a new console’s release. They don’t make or break its success – that’s primarily down to the games, raw horsepower, price and where your friends are playing.
But nonetheless, they are an essential component to every console. It’s a persistent part of the experience of gaming. You have to look at it every time you boot your console up. While we tend to ignore that it’s there when it works well, a bad interface can ruin a gaming session. The PlayStation 3 user interface, for example, became insufferably slow by the end of its life. You still have to wait a good two minutes for the PlayStation Store to load there.
Microsoft took the unusual step of not developing a bespoke user interface for its new generation of consoles, instead opting to develop a cross-generation…
