The PS5 doesn't ship with a dedicated wishlist feature. That surprises a lot of people, given how mature Sony's PlayStation Network has become. What you get instead is a scattered set of options: a "Save for Later" function inside the PlayStation Store on a web browser, a collection view on your console, and whatever mental list you're maintaining between visits to the PlayStation Store. For Australian players who want to make smart purchase decisions and keep a growing library manageable, knowing how these tools fit together is actually worth five minutes of your time.
How the PlayStation Store's "save for later" actually works
On the PlayStation Store website, you can add any game to a wishlist-style list by clicking "Save for Later" on its product page. The list lives under your account. It doesn't push notifications when a game goes on sale, and it won't appear anywhere on your PS5's interface directly. It's a browser-side tool, full stop.
That limitation matters in Australia because PlayStation Store sale events don't follow a tidy calendar. Prices drop during the mid-year sale, the End of Year sale, and Sony's irregular publisher promotions throughout the year. Without a sale alert, you'll miss discounts on saved titles unless you check manually. Third-party services like PS Deals fill this gap by letting you link a PSN account or manually add games, then send email or push alerts when the price drops in your region. It supports the Australian store. It's free. Most serious PS5 players in Australia use it.
Curating your PS5 game library on the console
Every PS5 owner eventually hits the same wall: a home screen showing 20 or 30 tiles, half of which are games you finished, abandoned, or bought in a sale and never launched. The PS5 doesn't hide completed games or let you archive them with a single tap. Here's what you can do instead.
From the home screen, highlight a game tile, press the Options button, and choose "Delete from Home Screen." The game stays in your library. It just stops cluttering your main view. For games you've fully uninstalled, the tile disappears automatically, but for digital titles you want to keep accessible without seeing daily, this is the only native tool Sony provides.
Inside the Games Library (accessible from the home screen's last icon), you can filter by installed games, PS4 titles, and recently played. That Recently Played filter is genuinely useful for finding something you put down three weeks ago without scrolling through everything. It's worth knowing that managing your PS5 game library storage ties directly to how you curate this view: games you've uninstalled still appear under "Not Installed," which keeps the catalogue readable even after you've cleared space on the drive.
Dealing with the backlog problem honestly
The average PS5 player in Australia has more unfinished games than they'll complete this year. That's not a criticism. It's a structural feature of how PlayStation sales, PS Plus subscriptions, and birthday gifts work. The backlog grows faster than the hours available to clear it.
A few approaches that actually help:
- Use the PS5's Activity Cards to check your completion percentage on each game before deciding whether to continue or abandon it. A 12% completion rate on a 30-hour RPG is useful information.
- Sort your library by "Last Played" and set a personal rule: anything not touched in six months gets uninstalled. You can always redownload it.
- Keep a short list of three to five games you're actively playing and move everything else to a "parked" mental category. Trying to progress five games simultaneously is why nothing gets finished.
PS Plus and free game curation
PS Plus Essential, Extra, and Premium all add games to your library automatically, or require you to manually claim them. Monthly PS Plus Essential titles have a deadline. If you don't claim them before the month turns over, they're gone. Sony doesn't send you a reminder push notification to your PS5; you have to check the Store yourself or follow a community tracker.
The PS Plus Game Catalogue (available on Extra and Premium tiers) is a different problem. It's a large, rotating library of titles you can download any time you're subscribed. But the catalogue changes: games leave it without much warning. If you start a PS Plus catalogue title and get halfway through, there's a real risk it rotates out before you finish. The practical fix is to check the PS Plus catalogue news at the start of each month and prioritise anything you know is leaving soon. It's a small habit that stops a lot of frustration.
For players managing storage alongside all of this, the choice between an external hard drive and an internal M.2 SSD shapes how freely you can keep games installed. If you're regularly juggling installs to make room for new titles, that's the constraint worth solving first. The PS5 storage options comparison covers the trade-offs between the two upgrade paths in detail.
Tags, collections, and what Sony still hasn't built
Sony hasn't shipped a tagging or collections feature for the PS5 library. Competitors have moved faster here. Nintendo Switch lets users create groups on the home screen. Xbox allows you to pin games, create folders, and customise the view. On PS5, your only organisation tools are the home screen tile order (manual, drag to reorder), the "Games" library sort options, and the hide-from-home-screen function.
The absence of custom collections is a genuine gap for players with large digital libraries, particularly anyone who has been building their PS4 back-catalogue through PS Plus or sales since the console launched. There's no native fix. The workaround most players land on is keeping the installed library trim, using the PS Store's "Save for Later" list as a purchase queue, and leaning on a third-party app or a simple notes file for anything more structured.
Sony has updated the PS5 interface several times since launch, and the Activity Cards and hint systems have improved significantly. A proper collections feature would be a straightforward addition. Whether Sony ships it in 2026 or continues to treat library management as a non-priority is the open question.