In recent months, digital storefronts across all gaming platforms have seemingly become inundated with AI-generated games, ‘shovelware’, and rip-off titles. Many games that make it to these storefronts are questionable at best, boasting copy-and-paste assets, paltry mechanics, and rinse-and-repeat content.
IGN carried out a recent investigation into the state of the quality assurance processes protecting these storefronts, focusing most specifically on PlayStation and Nintendo stores. It was noticed in the last couple of days that some of these ‘spam games’ have been silently stripped from the PS5 store.
Are we about to witness a mass exodus of shovelware games from our digital stores?
Churn Them Out
PlayStation users were complaining about a shovelware epidemic on the platform’s digital storefronts years ago. It’s a problem that has been brewing for a while, but it peaked recently with an investigation that was carried out by IGN. It seems that QA processes are slacking, encouraging ‘developers’ to push dozens of asset-flip, AI-generated games to storefronts.
PS4 and PS5 users have noticed the vast amounts of shovelware winding up in their search results – and some developers are standing out as the key culprits.
For instance, RandomSpin Games, which releases multiple ‘games’ a month, all of which are low-effort, mostly pointless creations. Breakthrough Gaming is another name. This developer was releasing two or three ‘RPG’ games a month at its peak. How about Zakym, which in the last five or six weeks has released around a dozen games – you can likely imagine how bad they all are.
Eurogamer noticed today that stacks of titles from RandomSpin Games, one of the biggest offenders on PlayStation, have been removed on the DL. It hasn’t been highlighted why they’ve been removed, but it could be a knock-on impact from IGN’s investigation, and PlayStation’s store operators are getting wiser about these deceptive practices.
Now, what will they do about the ‘scam’ copies that pop up, like the fake Black Myth game or the rip-off version of The Last of Us on Nintendo Switch?
Have you been troubled by shovelware on the PlayStation store? Let us know on the Insider Gaming forum.
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