When I turned on my PS4 last night I was a little confused to find Destiny sitting there, waiting for download. Did I accidentally buy Destiny in my sleep? Was it a cool technical error that landed me a free game? Turns out, I wasn’t the only one–Destiny: The Taken King was on everybody’s PlayStation 4 dashboards, alongside all our other purchased games. It’s not free, but it’s just a link–basically an ad for the game. And it’s preventable.
This “personalized, curated content” is brought to you by PlayStation’s promotional experiment with this download prompt. “The PS4 system has the ability to learn about your preferences. It will learn your likes and dislikes, allowing you to discover content pre-loaded and ready to go on your console in your favorite game genres or by your favorite creators.” Apparently Destiny is everybody’s probable favorite, or something.
If you’re not that into the feature, you can turn it off. From the PS4 home screen, you can go to Settings > scroll down to System > select Automatic Downloads > and uncheck Featured Content. Or, of course, if you’ve been meaning to pick Destiny up for a while and were just too lazy to go to the PS Store, maybe this is the opportunity you’ve been waiting for.
