So what’s wrong with the PS5 UI?

Even though the Xbox Series X has been getting into the hands of developers worldwide for weeks, Sony’s PS5 has proven to be far more elusive. We had a single preview event with some Japanese Youtubers, a couple of showcases, and last week a new demolition showing the inside of the new machine. While the hardware is exciting to see, there’s one more big thing we haven’t seen and that is the user interface.

People speculated that we would see the UI at this Japanese Youtube event, but we weren’t so lucky. Sony has promised a brand new user interface for the PS5, stating that “no pixel will be left untouched,” and according to Verge, it will be “soon” demonstrated as early as June. We even saw a small – very small teaser.

Sony's small PS5 UI teaser there pic.twitter.com/D7m6SrVfCk

— Tom Warren (@tomwarren) June 11, 2020

One explanation here is the obvious one: we haven’t seen the UI because it isn’t finished. This doesn’t feel like the world’s craziest guess or the world’s end to me. It’s possible the software just gets a little hot here, either due to the big transition from work from home in 2020, ongoing operations development issues, or a combination of both. If that were true, it wouldn’t mean in any way that it wasn’t ready to go, just that things are moving pretty fast here on the home stretch.

However, it seems possible that a delay in the user interface has deterred Sony from having a more robust preview program like the one Microsoft did with Xbox Series X. As mentioned, there are a ton of X out in the wild series already, and that means my social media feed has been full of backward compatibility videos for the Microsoft console for the past few weeks. It’s the kind of thing that is likely to come out of the laundry in the next few months, but is difficult for Microsoft to interpret as anything but a positive result.