Shortly after the PS5's official reveal, Matt McLaughlin, Sony's vice president of UX design, stated that the PS5 "can be customized in a way that wasn't possible in the previous generation of consoles"

He was referring to the PS5's faceplate

He was presumably referring to the faceplate, which we now know is removable It doesn't look like they will keep the theme, and at least at launch, every PS5 will have the same UI design

As the above tweet explains, this does not mean we are looking at a boring black screen Rather, it could be worse, as when you hover over a game, a splash screen of that title fills the UI

There is no official explanation for the lack of themes, but I suppose it means that while it is nice to see classic themes in 4K, they no longer fit the same way because of the UI changes For those who have been playing PS4 titles for the past seven years, the PS5 interface will certainly look familiar, but there are enough differences to ensure that the old theme will not migrate without significant changes

Of course, just because a theme is not available at launch does not mean it will always be so In fact, custom themes did not exist on PS4 until the 20 update was applied in October 2014

It would be surprising if Sony did not have something in place down the road In particular, paid themes are a bit of extra income for developers and publishers; even the free themes distributed with PS Plus are a quality-of-life extra to make the subscription worthwhile

Still, it's a little disappointing that everyone will have the same home screen at launch Even more so since, as of this writing, the console is only available in white And one enterprising third party came up with a custom plate to fix that, but it has since been shut down by Sony

Hopefully this is a sign that Sony is working on its own first-party PS5 plate The mock-up of the "Spider-Man: Miles Morales" PS5 custom plate is a license to print money