PlayStation Removes Over 1000 PS5 Games Without Warning

PlayStation has just removed over a thousand PS5 games from the PS Store, as part of a wider crackdown on improving online safety on the platform.

As discovered earlier this week, every game on the PlayStation Store released by publisher ThiGamesDE has been delisted by Sony. This makes for a total of 1,194 games removed across both PS4 and PS5. At the time, the publisher had the fourth highest number of games on the store.

Many games released by ThiGamesDE were regarded as shovelware titles, in which players could farm them for easy platinum trophies. These games include the likes of the Quiz Thiz series and The Jumping Burger.

This puts it behind eastasiasoft with 2,018 titles on the PlayStation Store, Ratalaika Games with 1,279, and Webnetic with 1,222. In fact, Sony itself doesn’t even land in the top 10, coming in at 11th place with 666 titles on the PlayStation store.

The reason for this has not been made clear by PlayStation, but it may be related to a joint statement released by Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo earlier this week, in which the big three aimed to “enhance player safety” on each online platform under their control.

"Easy Platinum" Games Are Gone From The PS5 Store

As part of this wider crackdown, games that are seen as “shovelware” are potentially being targeted for removal due to the apparent lack of effort on the developers’ part.

“Easy platinum” games like this are essentially seen as low-effort content that appears on the storefront, where players are being charged for essentially being able to simply raise their trophy level on the service, with not much actual game being available to the player.

It’s possible that we’ll see this from more publishers in the future, as Microsoft and Nintendo also seek to improve the quality of games available on their storefronts by removing these games and presenting a more carefully-curated selection of games on services like Game Pass or Nintendo Switch Online.

The Nintendo eShop in particular has been accused of promoting shovelware titles at the top of its pages, which led to the storefront being slow and cumbersome to use during the final years of the Nintendo Switch.

When the Nintendo Switch 2 launched, performance of the store was seemingly much better, but still has the same problem of featuring low-effort content alongside popular AAA and indie hits, which definitely irked some players.