PS5 themes: Can you customize your homescreen?

By Jesse Lennox Updated November 5, 2024

The PlayStation launched without many features that we loved from the PS4 . Over the years, a few have come back, but what about themes? These could be earned, downloaded, or purchased, and some even came included with certain games that gave your home screen a new look and background soundtrack related to different games or concepts. This made customizing your home screen that much more fun and personal. However, is this feature on the PS5? Here’s whether or not you can put custom themes on your new console or change the background.

Does the PS5 have themes?

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

No, 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.

Meanwhile, Sony just launched its second-generation virtual reality headset, called the PlayStation VR2, or PSVR2 for short. It’s shaping to be a promising device, though not one without its share of shortfalls (it costs more than the PS5 itself, for one, and doesn’t have the best suite of launch titles). The reason we’re talking about it now, though, is because like the PS5, you can’t change the background or use themes on the PSVR2 — but you probably could have guessed that.

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Jesse Lennox has been a writer at Digital Trends for over four years and has no plans of stopping. He covers all things…

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