(Long rant) What is everyone's thoughts on all the easy/shovelware platinums?

[The-Man-In-Black]

I grew up in the video game crash of 1983.  To 10 year old me, those were the glory days of home gaming.  I could take my $2 allowance, head down to the department store, and grab just about any game out of the bargain bin as stores desperately tried to unload stock.   99% of the time, I had no idea of what the hell I was buying.  Sometimes I got games that kept me entertained for weeks (Cosmic Ark and Dragonfire were particular favorites of mine).  Sometimes I got duds.   But even with the duds, they'd often at least keep me entertained longer than the $2 would last me at the arcade.  So either way, it was still a win.  

 

I have an ongoing contest with my godchild, though she has recently all but abandoned it.  We compete with each other for bragging rights on our trophy counts.  Quality doesn't matter.  Difficulty doesn't matter.  All that mattered was padding our trophy counts.  Why?  Because we could.  Was it a stupid, pointless waste of money?  Yup.  Did we care?  Nope.  It was fun.  That's all that mattered.  

 

Needless to say, I have a bit of a soft spot for shovelware.  And in some cases (admittedly, very few.  But they exist), some of the games are at least better than they're given credit for.   We're not talking AAA titles here, but well worth the couple of bucks on the price tag.  

 

But my god, even by my very forgiving standards regarding shovelware, I think Sony has allowed it to go way too far.  In the early days of trophy hunting, easy platinums were games like Terminator:  Salvation.   Kid's games.  Move tie-ins.  Even stupid shit like Hanna Montana.  Certainly not games of the year by any stretch of the imagination, but they were at least legitimate games and not blatant cash grabs aimed solely at people like me.    But nowadays, there's an entire industry of games that are little more than selling platinums for a couple of bucks each.   It started with games like My Name Is Mayo and Slyde.  Now we have companies like Breakthrough Gaming, Ratalaika, Smobile, EastAsiaSoft, etc. pumping out 99 cent shovelware on a literal daily basis.   And the "quality" of these games is dropping with each passing day.  A lot of the Ratalaika games are at least passable low-end indie games, with some gems thrown in the mix (The midnight series is pretty decent, for example).  But then you get companies like Breakthrough who are literally drawing stick figures and pumping out games that would have been bad even by 1983's standards.   The fact that these games even exist at all shows that there is absolutely no quality control coming from Sony, and they'll allow anyone to publish anything.  

 

I played a lot of these games.  Take a look at my trophy list.  It's full of games like this.  (Side note:  I'm going to take the time to point out my own hypocrisy and apologize to the trophy hunting community as a whole for heavily contributing to the exact problem that I'm here complaining about.).  But when I saw the recent dump of shovelware that has infested the Playstation Store over the past couple of months, I started thinking....enough is enough.   There's more shovelware now than playable games.   It drags down the overall quality of the Playstation Store.  It negatively impacts indie gaming.  It marginalizes trophy hunting, turning it into nothing more than a cash grab.  It has basically killed leaderboards on sites like this, as most of the top players have basically bought their way to the top by playing 99 cent games en masse.  It's done far more harm than good.  

 

I know it'll never happen as Sony isn't going to willingly give up their cut of the revenue that the shovelware generates, but I'd love to see Sony implement at least some quality control and eliminate the blatant 5-minute-platinum-cash-grabs.  I don't even want to see all of them go:  Like I said, there's a place for games like Ratalaika's "Midnight" series.   But do we really need dozens of games of a literal stick figure playing a game that often isn't even anywhere close to the game they're saying it is, throwing up a random Bible quote and basically selling you a 45 second platinum for a buck a whack?   At the very least, I'd like to see them go back to the days where shovelware like this may get a handful of trophies, but no platinum.   As someone with literally over 100 of these games in my trophy list, I fully understand why someone who would look at it would consider my entire trophy list worthless because these platinums are there.   I don't really care, as I play for my own satisfaction and not to show off my trophy list.   But if Sony were to announce tomorrow that all these games would be delisted and they'd do a better job of controlling the quality of games they allow on the store, I'd be the first to thank them for it.  

 

TL;DR:  I fucking love shovelware, but even I think that enough is enough already.  

 

 

[Stevieboy]