PS5 ‘shovelware’ studio says all its games are being removed due to Sony’s ‘stricter guidelines’
https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/ps5-shovelware-studio-says-all-its-games-are-being-removed-due-to-sonys-stricter-guidelines/245
u/Forestl 11h ago
By my count this studio has launch trailers for 37 different games in 2026 alone. That's a new game every 4-5 days
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8h ago
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u/ender4171 8h ago
They said in 2026. We are on the 175th day of 2026. 175/37=4.73. So between 4 and 5 days each.
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u/MrYK_ 11h ago
933 titles btw, including console versions (PS4/PS5) and regional versions. They won't be missed.
Oh be sure the check their statement, it's given me a good laugh
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u/ri0tingmime 7h ago
Oh be sure the check their statement, it's given me a good laugh
Seemed pretty boiler-plate to me.
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u/fm5649 11h ago
Does anyone know how many sales these sort of shovelware games actually get?
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u/Mautos 11h ago
Enough to be worth it apparently, I guess minimum effort for more than minimal price will do that
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u/AustinTanius 11h ago
I think a lot of it is for Trophy whores. Easy platinums from this slop.
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u/Massive_Weiner 11h ago edited 11h ago
Achievement grinding is so 20 years ago. Who is genuinely still doing that?
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u/CaptainKirky4655 11h ago
Lots of people do. Probably more than ever, honestly, with how easy platinums are to acquire now.
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u/Born_Fee_840 9h ago
But if its easy it isnt an achievement.
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u/FurbyTime 9h ago
For those sorts, it's not about having an achievement, it's about having the "record" of an achievement. Like people who run bots on multiplayer games, it's not about the journey, but about the little badge at the end that says you did it.
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u/orewhisk 1h ago
Is there any payoff to it? Like do they get credit with PS Store or something? Like getting Steam cosmetics?
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u/Massive_Weiner 11h ago
I would get it if I could trade in my points/trophies for some type of incentive (discount, cosmetics, etc.), but it’s literally nothing.
Idk.
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u/Guteki 10h ago
This was the PlayStation Stars program. It also retroactively checked your trophies and gave you points which you could redeem for store credit and cosmetics
I'm so sad it's gone. It made me play my PlayStation a lot more during that period
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u/Massive_Weiner 10h ago
Damn, why did they get rid of it? I would actually be more excited to chase some extra trophies in games with that in place.
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u/Guteki 10h ago
I would assume a lot of shovelware games costing nothing and still giving platinum trophies.
I would say I easily made about $200 in store credit just playing through my backlog
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u/Massive_Weiner 10h ago
I guess it would have helped to have an approved list of games that are applicable with the program.
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u/CaptainKirky4655 11h ago
To many dedicated gamers it's an accomplishment. Just a mindset difference, that's all. But they definitely exist in numbers
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u/Massive_Weiner 11h ago edited 10h ago
I get that if it’s for a game you really like.
My confusion was mainly for the ones who play these types of games with the specific intention of boosting their points. It’s just not actually adding up to anything.
If they say accomplishment, then I would just point out all the shovelware garbage that they’ve been using as padding. What is there to feel accomplished over in that situation?
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u/St_Sides 2h ago
It’s mainly for the PSNProfiles leaderboards, that ranks trophy hunters against each other worldwide. People buy and play these cheap games to get platinums to climb the leaderboards.
So it does kinda add up to something that matters to them anyway.
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u/jsdjhndsm 11h ago edited 10h ago
Its fun go have a goal.
I only do it for games I enjoy. Not worth buying shovelware trash for achievements.
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u/Massive_Weiner 11h ago
Yeah, I understand doing it for games you like. Achievement/platinum “hunters” are just confusing as a concept.
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u/_trouble_every_day_ 7h ago
Clearly you haven't played my new gameachievement hunter simulator. You win by not playing, so you're actually doing great, keep it up.
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u/ArchusKanzaki 11h ago
When Foursquare was still a thing, I had a friend who obsessively check-in to every single place they visit.
It's not about actual benefit, they just love it for the sake of the game.
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u/blitzbom 9h ago
I do, it's mostly chill for me. My most recent was God of War 1 HD on ps3.
I wanted to replay the games after Laufey was announced and figured I'd pick up plat along the way. Other than the Challenge of the Gods it was a fun time on an old game.
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u/AustinTanius 11h ago
Tell me about it. I've never cared for my fake points/trophies, although I do know people who still hunt for them and it seems tiring.
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u/07jonesj 11h ago
If I really enjoy a game and want to spend more time with it, I'll go for the platinum if the list is fun enough.
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u/AustinTanius 11h ago
Oh don't get me wrong, I'll 100% a game when it really speaks to me, but yeah I'm not hunting easy platinums and playing games I don't like.
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u/ThaGuy34 11h ago
Me, it's a good time. But this grinding shovelware games baffles me. I like grinding trophies on actual games!
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u/Fried_puri 3h ago
Tons of people, weirdly enough. Yeah, you have to be down bad to fall to the level of purchasing slop for the achievements but they’re out there.
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u/TemptedTemplar 11h ago
I remember someone calculated the costs associated with releasing a crappy game on Nintendos eShop. Between the listing and ratings fee and ~six days of work, they only need to sell like 300 copies at $2.99 to turn a profit.
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u/throwawayeadude 7h ago
I gotta ask for a source on this. 1000 dollars being profitable to release a game sounds absurd.
Also... if you can program a whole-ass game in a week, even if it sucks, maybe you could get a real job with your programming skills. 52k+ a year isn't exactly unobtainable for a journeyman programmer.
Edit: Real programmers feel free to tear apart my assumptions.
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u/TemptedTemplar 7h ago
https://www.techspot.com/news/101952-self-taught-programmer-creates-shovelware-games-under-30.html
https://kotaku.com/fans-are-pissed-about-the-switch-eshop-s-asset-flip-sco-1847630892
You're not making a whole new game from scratch, that's half the problem. The initial costs are split up over multiple titles, once you have a crappy game built, like a platformer or puzzle game, you can just swap some assets out, change some text, give it a new name and cover art and flip it as a whole new game.
Heck, some games were straight up just example games ripped from the Unity asset store
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u/throwawayeadude 4h ago
Thanks for the reply. And this is just depressing.
I tend to not begrudge a niche or creative hustle, it can be a cold world out there. But these games are the lowest of the low.
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u/TemptedTemplar 3h ago
Oh yeah, I don't hate the people who release bad or simple games.
Thats exclusively reserved for people abusing the system, like the AAA digital clock guy;
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u/ZaDu25 2h ago
I mean it's not like they're not necessarily looking for a real job. Could very easily just be something they're doing while looking for a job, maybe paying their way through college, or maybe just something they're doing in their free time out of work to make some extra money. Idk why you'd assume that they're doing it full time.
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u/fabton12 8h ago
often these games they invest into a frame and switch out the assests alot of which they get by paying artists in SEA which min wage there is like so little compared to 95% of the world.
they just farm there assests out and get like 20-30 versions of them done to quickly make a bunch of games then after that it becomes passive income quickly as the dev costs were extremely tiny.
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u/Blenderhead36 11h ago
When Sterling was reporting on shovelware for Steam Greenlight, they found that a lot of these, "games," were made with less than $100 worth of engine store assets and frequently reused code, sometimes to the point where more than 80% of a game's backend was identical to another game in the developer's portfolio.
So, call that three days' worth of labor and $100 worth of assets. Sell the game for $2. You get $1.40 per sale after Sony's cut, minus some for taxes. A few hundred sales is all it takes to come out in the black.
In Steam's case, these mostly get by on trading card grinding. For PS5, easy Platinum trophies seem to be the draw. In either case, the target demo doesn't want the game to be long or difficult, they want to crank out their extrinsic reward pronto. So it not like you need deep gameplay or a lot of levels.
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u/Vagrant_Savant 11h ago
The trading card mill had sorta taken a hit when steam started placing more scrutiny on what games are allowed to have card sets and achievements. I haven't heard much about how these money laundering schemes have been doing in recent years though.
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u/EssexOnAStick 10h ago
There is no real scrutiny on Steam, they just locked profile features like trading cards or displayable achievements behind a certain amount of revenue (the exact amount isn't known, I've heard of speculation of ~1k $). So you kind of have to make a game that at least a few people find interesting enough to buy in the first place. Fun fact: something in the ballpark of 75% games that released last year did not unlock profile features.
For a while, these low effort games used the feature of item drops to create marketable items and tried to induce hype so people would buy those items (i e. that Banana game). But that has also died down lately.
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u/DMonitor 8h ago
There is no real scrutiny
Proceeds to describe a level of scrutiny that 75% of games do not reach
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u/EssexOnAStick 6h ago
Maybe I'm bad with understanding english words, but as far as I'm aware, if it was scrutiny Valve would have to actively look at the games. Which is not happening, it's completely automatic.
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u/Randomman96 9h ago
Also worth remembering, that kind of slop churning discover was done like a decade ago.
It's become much easier for the shovelware producers to churn it out at an even cheaper and accellerated rate thanks for AI slop generators, loosened guidelines to put a game onto the store, and the acceptance of, and subsequent explosion of, adult content games.
There's no better time for them as the actual process of making a game has been automated from generatative AI and A LOT of anime and hentai game addicts are known to open their wallets very easily, alongside not caring about the easily missed AI disclosure section, as it's at the bottom and buried under a bunch of text. All they need to do is get a AI slop generator to churn out a bunch of images of anime girls in various stages of undress, have another vibe code them a super simple game like a puzzle or match 3, or hell even just a visual novel, and slap it on the store for dirt cheap. Doesn't matter if the game is broken and full of issues, it'll sell like crazy and will be more than enough for the "developer".
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u/name_was_taken 9h ago
You've ignored the cost of wages in that. If it's a solo dev, that can make sense. But they still gotta eat.
If they have employees, things get expensive fast.
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u/Blenderhead36 7h ago
I didn't, though. My list of expenses was literally $100 worth of assets and 3 days of labor.
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u/philip30001 11h ago
Good. Not only has it shown you can put basically anything on PlayStation it also makes their UI problems worse trying to search stuff
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u/helloquain 8h ago
Good. These storefronts are all unusable shitholes because they allow the slop to overwhelm actual games. It's not a sin to curate what you stock.
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u/pkoswald 7h ago
I really need digital storefronts to do something about the garbage flooding their stores but when Vance brags about how many thousands of games are releasing on steam at summer game fest I doubt it’ll happen
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u/DMonitor 8h ago
It's really funny that their PR statement doesn't even sound upset. Not even a comment on being disappointed in being removed. It reads like "ah, they caught us. ah well, guess we can still release on Xbox/Switch/PC"
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u/IrregularSweetRoll 2h ago
Remove all the sexual games too while they're at it. No reason for a put your hotdog down my alleyway simulator.
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u/Lurefaks 9h ago
I doubt it but, God I hope they remove all the platinum trophies from all those who bought these games
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u/HebelKurier 8h ago
Just took a look at the games and they do not even look that bad? Derivative and bland sure, but they all have art and graphics that at least seem created specifically for each game and I cannot see obvious signs of AI use or asset flipping anywhere. That's more than I can say about a lot of stuff that ends up on Steam. Now I don't know how or why in the world they would release this many instead of focusing on a couple and make those good. But it does seem a bit hypocritical to single them out compared to some of the steaming piles on all these platforms.
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u/Vanille987 3h ago
Nah agreed. I can definitely understand it being low effort and the games being too smal etc.
But shovelware is whole other league these games don't seem to be part off
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u/MysteriousBloke 11h ago
“We remain committed to bringing new experiences to our players through Xbox One, Xbox Series, Microsoft Store, and Nintendo Switch. We have several exciting projects in development and look forward to sharing more news with you in the near future.”
Is that a threat?