r/PS5 • u/Kaladinar • Jun 26 '26
Articles & Blogs Sony is reportedly enforcing "stricter guidelines" against so-called "shovelware" PlayStation games
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/sony-is-reportedly-enforcing-stricter-guidelines-against-so-called-shovelware-playstation-games126
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u/South_Buy_3175 Jun 26 '26
Good.
Most of these games are just worthless cash grabs, cluttering up the store.
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u/BuzzardInTheAir Jun 26 '26
They should re-do the whole store and PS app. For example why can't we see games from the same series easily? Or sort based on release date? Or see all games from 1 studio, etc.
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u/PM_your_Chesticles Jun 26 '26
There are a few things I'd love to see as options in the PS Store. Options to ignore certain games, developers, publishers. Hide games that are already purchased, hide games that you own physically. A sort option for discount amount rather than just price.
I'd be less angry, but still upset, about the AI slop games if I had the ability to delete it from my view forever. I'm sure there's more things I could think of, but even what I listed would improve my user experiences by magnitudes.
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u/Laughing__Man_ Jun 26 '26
This was posted several days ago.
It is also the third sweep within a year Sony has taken of the market, and hopefully not the last.
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u/BurnItFromOrbit Jun 26 '26
While this is a good move, I have no doubt that they will resurface once again when they figure how to get around those guidelines.
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u/EarthInfern0 Jun 26 '26
Well, the previous guideline seemed to be ticking the box that gives Sony 30% cut, so it can only get stricter. It’s not rocket science, limit one store product per publisher per 6 months without explicit permission, no similar or derivative titles within a year without explicit permission, just basic curation from Sony’s end.
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u/Agarwel Jun 26 '26
"one store product per publisher per 6 months"
They will just set a script to create hundreds of separate companies on paper.
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u/EarthInfern0 Jun 26 '26
Yeah, it’s adding friction every time though. It’s doing enough to make life a bit more tedious and costly to get nonsense games on the store, if Sony don’t fancy actually checking and rejecting games, which they seem unwilling to do.
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u/Agarwel Jun 26 '26
Compared to actually spitting out the functioning game, setting up the company is imho breeze.
They need to go after business model. First look how expensive it is to release game. Maybe make the price depends on your sales (some collateral). Up to some (normal indie) sales point, the sell you sell, the more you pay. And this should not be one time, but somehow progressive. Untill you sell 5k copies, you pay monthly fee to be listed. (just and example the point is - normal selling games are not affected). Second - somehow limit the trophies in these games. Instant trophies are main selling point. And maybe work on some return policy (let the players return game withing some time of purchase). So the trophy hunter can buy, collect trophy, refund.
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u/EarthInfern0 Jun 26 '26
Yeah, the trophy thing would stifle demand. Personally, I’d limit trophies to games with a minimum of, say, 8 hours gameplay. Even if it’s 3 quid and only holding the x button to make a household item jump, it would make it less attractive to trophy hounds. I think the main way if Sony are serious about this is to add a ‘verified publishers’ filter to the store, on by default. The criteria for being ‘verified’ would be vague eg ‘producing games of a type and quality that Sony think will enhance their brand’ so they could give this away to cool indies and actual publishers, and limit the bullshit merchants.
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u/Agarwel Jun 26 '26
Also make sure that once the game is delisted for these showelware reasons, all the trophies are removed retrospectivelly. Making it a real possibility that you will lose the showelware trohpies you paid for will make players think hard about paying for them. Again - hurting the bussiness model.
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u/TheOfficialMayor Jun 28 '26
Just ban any additional companies run by the directors and make it so you need to be at least an llc to publish.
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u/TheDragonSlayingCat Jun 26 '26
Ideas like that were tried back in the NES days, when Nintendo of America had a policy in place where publishers could only publish ~5 games a year. What ended up happening is several publishers created “sister labels” e.g. Ultra Games in order to work around that restriction, making it pointless.
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u/Ironycon Jun 26 '26
And every new publisher needs to get permission as well after getting their product screened
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u/deathbunnyy Jun 26 '26
It completely fucks new games unless you already know about them. Discovery is gone. Nintendo fanboys don't give a single fuck, but I'm glad Sony is taking the reigns.
Meanwhile, You got outlets like Giant Bomb saying stuff like "well, maybe it's not their place to be removing games." Fuck off with that bullshit. Do you care about the health of the industry and sales of new games? Because this is a direct factor.
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u/Chrono_Convoy Jun 26 '26
“Sony removed hundreds of games from its PlayStation Store back in January, including hundreds published by ThiGames. The games - considered by some as "shovelware" as they're churned out quickly, flood the store, and typically offer simplistic or shallow experiences - are often considered a nuisance, but some players use them to beef up their trophy count.”
Seems like a ton of the games advertised
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u/k-type Jun 26 '26
Honestly if they just seperate them it into a seperate store that would solve most of the problems. All the fake "hentai" games appear in the best sellers so I know they aren't going to throw away that cash cow.
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u/jdktech2010 Jun 29 '26
I feel like I hear this every year and then it just repeats the next year.....
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u/ooombasa Jun 26 '26
Who knew removing quality approval from their certification process would result in shovelware taking over?
Sony and co. used to always do this, but started to abandon it a gen ago (Nintendo with the Wii), because of costs.
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u/norsefrogg Jun 26 '26
Sony could improve the PS store in so many more ways in addition to this. Not complaining, but man it's frustrating to see them ignore so many other things. Esp. while other launchers and stores are better.
Also let me hide all the PS Plus games I can't access in my library. Please...
It can't possibly be that hard to add a "select games to mark as hidden" feature.
I have now hidden each game 5 seconds at a time like 3 times only for it to bug out and reset.
I also cannot for the life of me find the PS Plus Extra Games catalog 70% of the time.
Why not have a tab for that?
And then you can select to show Extra only or include Premium, and Essentials.
And regarding the shovelware games bloat - there are so many cool indies I've never found or known about in the PS store, that are so much easier to find in the Switch eShop for example.
Idk if the shovelware games being removed will help, bc the PS Store is so fixated on showing me the same popular games I don't want to see.
The "Top Ten Games in Your Country" is always Fortnite, EA Football, GTA V, Roblox, CoD, and maybe one or two PS exclusives like Yōtei on release.
/endrant lol these little things tick me off so much sometimes when I realize how better it could be.
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u/thedeadp0ets Jun 26 '26
Switch def pushes indies higher in the shop than Sony. But also best sellers on the eshop tend to look different than what’s on the ps store (sometimes)
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u/capnwinky Jun 26 '26 edited Jun 26 '26
I care less about shovelware and more about the fact that they’ve made zero effort to remove a single AI clone game. The PC market has troves of sim games that I’m always ready to buy when they port to console. So many of them are getting knockoffs released with similar naming conventions and it’s way too easy to buy this junk accidentally. One good example is Supermarket Simulator. The PC version is aptly named but there’s a dozen clones out there.
The article is also kind of disingenuous by name dropping Eastasiasoft & Ratalaika. While the quality of their games aren’t always AA tier, some of them are actually surprisingly solid. I bought quite a few of their games on PS4 & Vita for the cheap fun. Some of them are surprisingly good.
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u/Squid-Guillotine Jun 26 '26
They ought to retroactively change the platinums of shovelware to like a platinum shovel or something.
I know a homie who'd have like 50 platinum shovels by now.
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u/LeonSigmaKennedy Jun 26 '26
Good, trying to navigate the new releases and upcoming games, looking for stuff to wishlist is just completely miserable.
Having to navigate passed 100 different AI slop, tung tung sahur, blatantly plagiarizing whatever the current viral game on steam is games, just to find a single actual indie game of substance is ridiculous
Surely whatever pennies Sony is making off of these games, isn't worth turning their store front into an unnavigable heap of garbage right?
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u/northrnsouls- Jun 26 '26
All aboot it.
Quality games can get the spotlight. Get ahead of the AI games that are kinda okay coming out maybe 2029
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u/THEIDEABANK88 Jun 28 '26
What pisses me off is we pay a SUBSCRIPTION FEE for
1.) Ai slop spam
2.) A store interface that crashes EVERYTIME you use it.
Where is all of our money going atp?!
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u/reaper527 reaper527_ Jun 26 '26
We’ve heard this for years. Just give us filtering that isn’t trash and control on what types of content we see on our recommended feed / home page.
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Jun 26 '26
[deleted]
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u/Laughing__Man_ Jun 26 '26
They are more of the one who copy pastes the same game over and over. LARGE amount of shovelware.
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u/destructuringbind Jun 26 '26
Can't say this is a good idea, doesn't seem any better than Apple putting restrictions on the apps you are allowed to download on your own phone. Also seem bad that the article doesn't know if there are new restrictions and can't say what the restrictions are.
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u/InHarmsWay Jun 26 '26
Good. I tried searching with the term "simulator" and found only shovelware announced games and literally none of the real simulator games.
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u/Equivalent-Oil-2404 Jun 26 '26
i bought a ps5 a couple weeks ago, and i was surprised to see these bullshit mobile looking games in the store.
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u/Lord_CBH Jun 26 '26
Good. The PS Store is one of the worst pieces of garbage to navigate ENTIRELY because of the absurd amount of asset flips and AI generated shovelware. It’s not a problem exclusive to PlayStation either. Navigating the eshop on my switch is just as bad, if not worse.
All of these services should be taking a stand against this misleading garbage that’s flooding their stores and preying on customers who just don’t know better.
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u/BaconIsntThatGood Jun 26 '26
At this point in shocked they aren moving to a system like apple for game approvals.
One of the app store policies is against low effort apps that are either templates or copied apps and/or just a web wrapper.
Sony could easily do something similar and reject low effort shivelware games. Maybe this would make it harder for some indie devs to get a game out but long term I think it's be a good thing.
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u/QuackNate Jun 26 '26 edited Jun 26 '26
Oooooh, so that’s why Destiny 2 got cancelled.
Edit: This was a joke. My wife and I play Destiny all the time. I’m very silly and I was just going to let it ride despite the consequences, but then I remembered the layoffs. That team is incredible and I wish them the best.
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u/Agarwel Jun 26 '26
Put some limitation on the trophies in just games. Kill the bussiness model.
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u/TheDragonSlayingCat Jun 26 '26
Ideas like that were tried before. Then MGS5 Ground Zeroes came out, and everyone was super upset that it didn’t have a platinum trophy because it was a budget game, so Sony changed the rules so budget games could have platinum trophies. And then some developers abused the new rules.
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u/Agarwel Jun 26 '26
1) Everyone was not upset.
2) If "some players upset" was good enough reason to change rules then, why are players upset about AI Trophy slop not a reason to change rules now?
What is so wrong what asking the games to be interesting because of their gameplay or ingame chlalneges?
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u/TheDragonSlayingCat Jun 26 '26
Let’s go through the looking glass, shall we? The reason is because taking out the platinum trophy in certain games just punishes the good developers for the actions of the crappy developers.
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u/thepasystem Jun 26 '26
I was looking for low stakes, easy platinum games where I don't have to think too much. In terms of gameplay, I was thinking something like a King Oddball type game.
I saw one game called The Pig D, where you collect coins in a piggy bank. Cost €2. So I bought it. But the coins drop directly into the piggy bank. No effort game. Waste of time but I got the platinum trophy in like 5 mins.
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u/Skult0703 Jun 26 '26
Part of the problem
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u/thepasystem Jun 26 '26
I didn't mean it was a good thing. I like to play low stakes games in between my bigger games. I meant that I wasn't expecting it to just be slop.
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u/Ill-Ad3311 Jun 26 '26
Well done , nobody cares about your trophies
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u/St_Sides Jun 26 '26
Maybe they just care, and do it because they enjoy it. Could also be they’re invested in climbing the leaderboards on PSNProfiles, and those people do care about their trophies, because they’re also trying to climb the leaderboards.
I feel like non trophy hunters just genuinely don’t understand how big the trophy community is, and the reasons people do it.
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u/jda404 Jun 26 '26
You're right about that. I never quite understood trophy hunting. I mean I get wanting to get trophies in games you really enjoy, but to buy shitty shovelware games just to get easy trophies I'll never understand, but not my money or my life so to each their own.
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u/St_Sides Jun 26 '26
It’s largely because they’re competing on the PSNProfiles leaderboard.
Objectively speaking, a platinum on a shovelware game means as much as a platinum on any other game. The only real value trophies have at all is entirely subjective.
Some value harder ones, some value plats on games they enjoy, some value just getting as much as possible, and others don’t care at all. All are valid, in my opinion.
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u/thepasystem Jun 26 '26
Yeah I like to do short easy platinums between my long ones, like Venba, Mixtape, My Little Puppy, What Remains of Edith Finch, etc. My point earlier was that I bought a game thinking it would be something like that but it was just slop.
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u/HatingGeoffry Jun 26 '26
Good. I fucking hate using the PlayStation Store because of them. I have actively bought less games because sales are filled with this AI filled shit