Featured Image Credit: Sony Interactive Entertainment
Topics: Sony, PlayStation, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4
Topics: Sony, PlayStation, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4
Sony has delisted hundreds of PS5 games from the PlayStation Store, as part of its latest cleanup of “shovelware” titles.
As reported by PSNProfiles (via Push Square), it appears that all games published by Welding Byte, GoGame Console Publisher, and VRCForge have all been removed from the PlayStation Store across PS4 and PS5.
These games include the likes of Jesus Simulator, I Am Busy Digging A Hole, and Six Seven Nights.
The reason for this move is due to the apparent quality of these games, typically featuring very limited functionality and AI generated assets.
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The idea behind them is to dupe potential customers into thinking the game is actually a more successful IP, such as I Am Busy Digging A Hole being made to look like A Game About Digging A Hole.
It’s a little similar to how movie companies like The Asylum produce films that resemble more popular films, but are made on a fraction of the budget and churned out very quickly.
There’s also the fact that these games have rather easy trophy lists, allowing completionists obsessed with showing off their total Platinum Trophy count to quickly increase their number with very little effort.
This action follows a similar move Sony made back in January, removing over a thousand games from the PlayStation Store that were of similar low-quality.
“I am glad Sony are stepping up and I hope all shops follow suit,” reads one comment on the PlayStation 5 Reddit page.
“Good, keep it up. I love browsing new games and finding hidden gems, but it’s really hard to do when there’s 90% low effort slop on the store,” reads another. “These sleazy ‘devs’ give some of the harder working indie developers a bad name and impact their sales by saturating the market with s***.”
“As someone who’s into trophies, PSNProfiles is about to be in shambles,” reads a third comment. The top of the leaderboards on that site are all doing the different region stacks of these easy gamerscore games.”
As AI-generated art and assets become increasingly unpopular with gamers, it’s likely we’ll start to see more of this kind of stuff happen on other storefronts.
Steam allows developers to add a disclaimer when a game features AI-generated content, with everything from small indie games to huge AAA productions required to disclose when it uses AI tools at any point in development.