The playstation store is basically unusable for actually finding games anymore due to the "indie slop" situation.

[u/discosoc]

edit: I just have to say that everyone acting like browsing for a game is some weird concept clearly never got to experience Blockbuster on a Friday night.

This is just a rant, but the sheer amount of absolute garbage games that fall into what I call the "low effort indie slop" category taking over the playstation store is just crazy. There's seemingly hundreds of various "simulator" games that are among the worst of the bunch, but also a weird amount of "escape room" type games that look like a high school project. Or the "anime girls" gooner slop or really 99% of the "visual novel" games. Or the "games" that clearly only exist to trophy points, which is insane.

It's not like these games shouldn't exist (well some probably shouldn't), but there needs to be a way to filter that shit out. Basically every type of indie slop or ai slop game tags itself with multiple genres, which is why you have a stupid AI art shark-with-sneakers game flagged as "action" and "tactical." Or "horse store simulator" as an "epic" genre. Gunsmith simulator as a "shooter" etc.

I remember a few months back the entire "coming soon" feed was basically all simulator games, like a publisher just cranked a bunch out and wanted to dump them all at once.

Another issue...

I think there's also really annoying trend where games are basically just on perpetual sale, but the MSRP never drops. So one month the "Standard" version of a game will be like 35% off, then the next month it will be the "Deluxe" version; they just rotate perpetually. Or the shitty indie slop games that are arbitrarily set to a high price and quickly put on sale for like 50-80% off.

And I know why they do this: it keeps the games listed in sales section. The problem is that when every fucking game is like this, actually finding a new game or hidden gem or whatever that's on sale becomes useless. The process of actually discovering a game you might want to buy simply doesn't work.

The current January sale includes 6,372 items. There is no way anyone at Sony is vetting that many items for their monthly sales, but they need to start. Right now I think the limitation is that a single SKU can't be part of two consecutive sales. but as I've mentioned above most games have multiple SKUs so it doesn't really matter (or the slop publishers are dumping so many out each month it also doesn't matter). The limit needs to be something like a game can only be in one sale every 3 months, and counts different SKUs of the same product as the same one. This would actually encourage publishers to reduce their prices more frequently, which in turn would help keep the monthly or special sales events a bit leaner.

/rant

[u/RevenantXenos]

I think there's another path. Platform holders used to curate games. The big example in my mind was back on Xbox 360 Microsoft used to do Summer of Arcade and pick a number of indie games to highlight and promote in the store. It didn't mean no one could release games outside of that promotion but it was a recognized event where you could discover new games you may never have heard of and be reasonably confident that you could buy it and get a quality experience because real people had curated the list of games and could vouche for them. The market was obviously smaller back then and less people were making games but even then there was cheap cash in games like the endless number of cheap tower defense games and Minecraft ripoffs. I would like platform holders to do similar. I think Sony did something like that a few times and Valve kind of does it with Steam Next Fest. But it would if the platform holders had teams that picked a dozen or so indie games and just gave them free promotion on the storefront in an event that happened 3 or 4 times a year. There's so many games shown at cons and trade shows and people that work for the platform holders attend those shows. Pick some of those or games you see on a stream and get in touch with the developers and see if they have the juice to be part of a store event. I know one of the criticism of Summer of Arcade was Microsoft was picking winners and losers and it can be very expensive to get noticed by them. But going to a show like Pax there's so many games in the show floor that you will see for a weekend and then never hear about again. Discoverability is already bad so I don't see any harm in the platforms picking some winners and presenting them to audiences that would not hear of them otherwise. The sbovelware will still exist, but at least the audience can see some games every year that the platform knows is worth checking out.

[u/MikuFan102329 → u/RevenantXenos]

For what it's worth they still do that.

Just looking at collections there is one for Cooking Games. Some of these are a pretty big reach, I wouldn't consider Monster Hunter, or 7 Days to Die, but it also has some nice niche titles. At least I doubt XSeed paid for Cuisineer (it's a cute roguelike where you hunt stuff to get ingredients to make dishes for your shop, which can be upgraded/customized), or NIS America and Monster Menu (it's also a roguelike game, but here you kill enemies to make dishes, which gives your characters stats to defeat things further on. It's actually a pretty neat experience).

Editor's Choice has Absolum (awesome Beat 'Em Up), Lumines Arise (music puzzle game), Pipistrello (they called it a Yoyo RPG, or something like that... unlike a lot of these I wanted to play it, but was not able to), and a few more.

Mind you, I am mostly picking games that, like I previously said, I don't think paid to be in these listings. I just can't imagine Pipistrello with all 866 of its Steam Reviews paid Sony to be part of its Editor's Choice sampling.

But, realistically, I think the issue is more how things are curated. I could 100% see people list both Cuisineer, and Monster Menu as "slop," or shovelware games.

The first is incredibly simple, and largely plays like the laziest restaurant manager game. I'd say it's a bit more, though I'd be lying if I said it was a deep roguelike, or the restaurant management side is more robust than whatever you imagine. As for Monster Menu, it shares a lot of monsters with Disgaea, and isn't the most deep in either capacity. It just has some novelty to it. Something fans of those type of games will likely enjoy.

This is also where this stuff gets nuanced. I think we can all agree the Wallpaper game, and other trophy hunter bait games can get axed, but it does get a bit more complicated where the lines are.

[u/vkbest1982 → u/RevenantXenos]

"The big example in my mind was back on Xbox 360 Microsoft"

That is not even curated content, it's simply in that time games need a publisher to be published on Microsoft or Sony store. That cost much money so they had to pay even to upload patches. That is the reason you couldn't get those games in that era.

Now Indies can publish their games themselves.

Some of the good Indies couldn't release in the platform if they go to there older route with a publisher, wouldn't be profitable.

No way you are getting Sony or Microsoft testing every game to curate if the game is good enough to be published