The PlayStation Store is no longer the slop-filled wasteland that it was once. Previously you couldn’t get past the home page without first encountering some low-effort ‘game’ designed to bolster your trophy list and take up valuable storage. Now, Sony has delisted several of these titles that took their developers all of five minutes to make, using a mixture of recycled assets and in some cases, AI.
Good riddance
Titles such as Backrooms Brotherhood, Supermarket Simulator Pro, and Bodycam Shooter are just a few of the games released in the past few months by one of the biggest contributors to the issue, RandomSpin. These developers, for lack of a better word, regularly pump out games – often once or twice a month – calling into question their quality. These were some of the first to be nixed by Sony.
Like a hydra, when you kill off one poor AI game, two more arrive to fill their place. A quick search of ‘Supermarket Simulator’ on the PlayStation Store reveals hundreds of similar titles, most of which are still marked as ‘announced’ to give the impression of work being done behind closed doors. Others are still up and charging unsuspecting customers – and have avoided Sony’s eye.
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Unfortunately, this isn’t an issue specific to the PlayStation Store. Nintendo’s eShop is notoriously lax regarding quality control – made even more infuriating by the eShop itself, which is held together by stringy mozzarella cheese and yarn. Low-effort, copycat games like Wukong Sun: Black Legend are scattered around the eShop, forcing users to wade through them to get to the real content.
There’s nothing inherently “wrong” with a bad game, but misleading titles that continue to drown out real listings, are. It’s unfeasible to imagine Sony and Nintendo can tackle the issue head-on, after the fact. More needs to be done to verify games and their developers before they are ever seen by users on the front end.
We don’t see that happening anytime soon – Nintendo does nothing to stem the flow of copycat and AI-filled games, for instance – considering that these earn their respective stores money. Sony at least has taken steps to improve the experience, even if it can’t vanquish every Supermarket Simulator out there.
