Sony has just earned some applause from a large section of the playerbase, as thousands of shovelware games from one single developer have just been removed. The developer, Thigames, is now no longer available on Sony’s PlayStation stores. Thanks to this move, users will be safe from accidentally downloading one of their hundreds of mass produced titles.
Thousands of ThiGames Shovelware Has Just Been Removed From Stores By Sony
Sony has finally acted on the ThiGames developer. This develop is single-handedly responsible for thousands of shovelware games that have been promoted on the PS5 and PS4 stores. This includes a plethora of food-themed games, color swipe games, and extremely simple maze/puzzle concepts. To say the least, ThiGames has floodded the PlayStation store with upwards of 1,196 titles, none of which are particularly inventive or interesting.
The wiping of ThiGames titles appears to be in part of larger effort from Sony towards keeping the store free of spam content and shovelware. In total, ThiGames was listed as the #4 developer in terms of how many games they have released in the store. That’s not to say this is anything impressive, though, as these titles are most definitely quantity over quality. One most notable game out of the bunch is ‘The Jumping Burger’, which also has a series of alternative ‘jumping’ games with different food items.
These games tend to fall into the $1-3 range on the store. Most consist of basic controls, such as pushing the X button to make items ‘jump’. Notably, they allow users to farm achievements/trophies quickly too. By simply pushing one button, players can earn Platinum Trophies in as little time as 1 minute 30 seconds.
Gaming Fans have strong opinions on Sony’s Approach to ThiGames
ThiGames is yet to acknowledge or make any statements about the removal of their titles from the PlayStation store. Here’s what other people in the gaming community are saying instead:
“That’s impressive, so one person spam PSN with 1000 games?”
“This makes me immensely happy. I really hope in the coming years Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo really start to take this shovelware problem seriously.”
“It is becoming even harder to find legitimate indie games among all of the AI shovelware in the Playstation Store. I personally think this is a great start from Sony, hopefully they do more frequent wipes like this.”
“It’s a great start, but there’s plenty of shovelware left. 15-minute platinum trophy slop and fake AI-art garbage clog up the Games to Wishlist section of the PS store.”
While the spam-posting of content to the store is a problem in itself, there are also some deeper issues connected. AI use is a prime example, with many shovelware games miscuing AI softwares to pump out extremely low quality assets or artworks for these projects. Sometimes, it’s even used to completely build all aspects of the game with minimal effort.
Fans of the gaming hobby can only hope that these significant removals continue to occur, and that storefronts will start to double-down on the problem. Until then, all we can do is wait for more news and keep our fingers crossed for cleaner store catalogues.
The post Sony Has Erased Thousands of Shovelware Games From One Developer appeared first on VICE.
