Sony Reportedly taking steps to ban Shovelware

[zizimonster]

When this actually happens, it'll be known as the Great Shovelware Purge, and everybody would get a good night's sleep.

 

?

[Diddi89]

Good move. I hope it’s true.

[EDGES]

the PSStore needs a good purge of a few hundreds trash games, not every game needs to be on a PlayStation

Edited November 22, 2022 by The Investigator

[Thrillhelm]

1 hour ago, xIRockyRock said:

 

These few bucks by people buying it isn’t the end of the world. And I wouldn’t be surprised if,… no I am pretty sure, they actually lose money releasing all this shit. 
 

Most of us are pretty deep into gaming, but imagine casual players scrolling through the PSStore, seeing nothing but shitty cash crabs could actually lead into not buying anything at all because they don’t have the patience scrolling through 100 „games“ to find a game. Or just leaving PSN completely. I mean, even for us it’s annoying. Think like a casual (no offense), who hasn’t the time to deal with this shit.

 

Also Sony wouldn’t change anything if this was a good business plan for them.

At first a 0.99$ game being banned from the store doesnt seem to be that much of a loss for Sony, but since there are thousands of shovelware games with multiple stacks and versions, and since there is a market for these kind of titles I'd say Sony would lose more than a couple of bucks there.

 

As for the "PS Store gets flooded" argument, that has been sorted out months ago by Sony using a filter. By the way using filters to search for a game works wonders if you are a so-called casual customer.

 

 

[Jinxcendant-XIII]

So any game made by the following developers are going?

Breakthrough gaming LLC

Game Achievements Ltd

Smobile Inc

ThiGames

Webnetic S.R.O

Zakym S.R.O

 

Hope so however I would buy the break games & frogo games.

Edited November 22, 2022 by Jinxcendant-XIII

[DrBloodmoney]

12 minutes ago, Thrillhelm said:

At first a 0.99$ game being banned from the store doesnt seem to be that much of a loss for Sony, but since there are thousands of shovelware games with multiple stacks and versions, and since there is a market for these kind of titles I'd say Sony would lose more than a couple of bucks there.

 

As for the "PS Store gets flooded" argument, that has been sorted out months ago by Sony using a filter. By the way using filters to search for a game works wonders if you are a so-called casual customer.

 

 

They’d probably make some cash selling NFTs, or Hentai, or Heroin on the site too - but what they gain in cash, they lose in credibility.

 

 

There’s an element to which the bad publicity and harm to reputation that comes from selling a product begins to be more costly than the profit made from selling it.

[Silver-I-Chariot]

18 minutes ago, Thrillhelm said:

At first a 0.99$ game being banned from the store doesnt seem to be that much of a loss for Sony, but since there are thousands of shovelware games with multiple stacks and versions, and since there is a market for these kind of titles I'd say Sony would lose more than a couple of bucks there.

 

Last time I checked these games were actually like 3 or 4 dollars so it's definitely more than 99 cents. They must have made lots of money with this.

[ArcadeJedi]

Good, I hope it’s true. 
 

 

[quadboy_007]

Sometimes You confirmed that he received the same email 3 weeks ago.
The weird thing is that we have seen plenty of releases still these past weeks, so I wonder how it works or when they plan to actually implement this. Because so far they don't seem to care and neither do the developers of shovelware.

[Aidan_sam]

Nice to see Sony taking steps to stop this junk coming onto the ps store but I don't think it will remove the problem of these games entirely I think they will just make the bare minimum of changes to class it as a different game instead, so instead of stroke the dog/cat/rabbit we get play fetch with the dog where you throw a ball to a dog 50 times and a game where you brush a horse 100 times.

[D-E-U-S-X]

31 minutes ago, Diddi89 said:

Good move. I hope it’s true.

The competitive players(like you) in the leaderboard still have to look where they can get platinums as quickly as possible in order not to lose their rank. The pressure to be at the top will not change, only the inflationary increase in numbers because a platinum takes 30 minutes instead of 5.

No offense, I know different people have different goals they want to achieve.

[iriihutoR84]

8 hours ago, Lordguwa said:

not a good thing to me. i like buying a few of those 1$ games it helps to move me into playing longer plat games.

 

You have played at worst a handful of them in the past year, depending on how you count shovelware. Just buy some Ratalaika 5-30 minute plats on sale for a dollar or two instead.

 

Sony is not banning easy plats, they are seemingly looking to ban the worst type of asset swaps and shovelware like The Jumping Food and Stroke the Dog. You don't even play these.

[Diddi89]

9 minutes ago, D-E-U-S-X said:

The competitive players(like you) in the leaderboard still have to look where they can get platinums as quickly as possible in order not to lose their rank. The pressure to be at the top will not change, only the inflationary increase in numbers because a platinum takes 30 minutes instead of 5.

No offense, I know different people have different goals they want to achieve.

Most likely I will.

But it means the Games become better again.

i liked a lot of ratalaikas.

Also the most people who knows me, also know I played the hard and good ones too.

and I will never let a good game pass, which I’m interested in for shovelware.

 

[The Alchemist]

3 hours ago, mcnichoj said:

People will just find out how to beat their "what counts as shovel ware" system and be right back at it.

If your game can't be completed in an hour, devs will just make their games an hour and a half. They raise it to two hours, devs just make the games over two hours. It will just become cat and mouse like Sony played back in the day on the PSP with firmware hackers. Plenty of high profile games are actually relatively short too, now I wonder if those will also get caught up in this. Or if those will be exempt but smaller indie studios with less press will get punished despite lovingly crafting original content, gameplay, stories and experiences.

 

I do worry that developers will try to find loopholes, although I suppose it comes down to how effectively Sony enforces this new policy. It appears that they're taking it very seriously, but I guess we'll have to wait and see what actually happens.

 

I don't know where you're getting the idea about shorter games from, though. There is absolutely nothing about short games listed in the guidelines. Nor easy games. These guidelines specifically target spam "games". 

 

"Multiple concepts and product variants, published by individual partners, that have duplicative functionality or experiences, differentiated only by minor variances of functionality or assets". 

 

The above quote is probably the most important takeaway from this. We all know what "games" fall under the above description and what you listed definitely does not. People need to stop panicking about legit games getting swept up in this purge, making up their own definitions in the process. Legit games and developers will not get punished under these guidelines, simply because they don't meet the criteria set out in the OP. Relax.

 

25 minutes ago, Thrillhelm said:

At first a 0.99$ game being banned from the store doesnt seem to be that much of a loss for Sony, but since there are thousands of shovelware games with multiple stacks and versions, and since there is a market for these kind of titles I'd say Sony would lose more than a couple of bucks there.

 

 

Do you know how much money the PlayStation division makes every year? Want to even take a wild guess at it? Almost as much as Nintendo and Xbox combined. The revenue that Sony makes from these shovelware trophy apps doesn't even qualify as a drop in the ocean. It's completely irrelevant. It's nothing. It's like a billionaire spending $1,000. It isn't going to be missed. 

 

But let's entertain your argument for a moment. Let's say that Sony did lose a "lot" of money were these shovelware trophy apps ever to get nuked from the PSN Store following the introduction of this policy. Why is that your concern? Unless you have a crapload of shares in Sony, then you shouldn't care at all whether Sony makes or loses money. It's not your problem. And in this particular case, any revenue gained will be quickly outweighed by the negative reputational loss incurred by continuing to host these shovelware trophy apps. We've already seen mainstream news sites picking up on this issue in recent months. We've seen noise coming from sites like Reddit, and trophy sites such as this one. People are taking notice, and Sony definitely have as well, hence this policy. Even if Sony was making a good amount of money from it (they aren't), it wouldn't be worth it in the end. 

 

It just seems like a very weak attempt to continue justifying the existence of these things. It isn't a valid argument. 

[Thrillhelm]

So just because one branch of Sony makes moneyin the billions it means they can forget about the money shovelware brings in?

 

Reddit noise lol. Why not Twitter as well? Buzz from (self-proclaimed) gaming journos. Everyone could post there, doesnt make it any more right. Shovelware may have been an issue for the Online Store but that's been sorted out. 

 

 

[Umdytr]

When it comes to removing worthless clutter when browsing the store this would be great. I've never really cared about the competitive leaderboards thing, so that aspect of this potential news doesn't interest me as much as being able to explore the game catalogue without whole blocks of The Jumping Dorito clones or whatever.

[The Alchemist]

2 minutes ago, Thrillhelm said:

So just because one branch of Sony makes moneyin the billions it means they can forget about the money shovelware brings in?

 

Reddit noise lol. Why not Twitter as well? Buzz from (self-proclaimed) gaming journos. Everyone could post there, doesnt make it any more right. Shovelware may have been an issue for the Online Store but that's been sorted out. 

 

 

 

It's okay. Denial is the first stage of the grieving process. You will get there eventually.

[Groudon199]

2 minutes ago, Thrillhelm said:

Shovelware may have been an issue for the Online Store but that's been sorted out.

 

Except it hasn't. If I sort by price to find a cheap game, I have to wade through a bunch of shovelware trash to find actual games.

[Thrillhelm]

4 minutes ago, Groudon199 said:

 

Except it hasn't. If I sort by price to find a cheap game, I have to wade through a bunch of shovelware trash to find actual games.

Well the new releases list filters them and by using a filter yourself (sort by price) its obvious they show up. After all the store cant tell if you look for them or not when using the price filter.

[VigilantCrow]

Shame. The games weren't entertaining but the constant threads sure were. I'll miss them

[GothGirlMaxine]

12 minutes ago, The Alchemist said:

It's okay. Denial is the first stage of the grieving process. You will get there eventually.

 

He's just salty that he'll never get to play Stroke The Raccoon  

[Sergen]

I don't think Sony is taking trophy lists into consideration here, simply the game content so Ratalaika games that got good reviews likely won't be a part of this purge. The games where all they did was take a picture of a dog and put a number next to it and you have to spam X to get that number higher until you unlock the platinum are the ones that are at risk. We always say that Sony doesn't care about trophies at all and I doubt that their quality control looks at the trophies when looking to publish a game so that's my take on it, authentic games that just so happen to have a very simple trophy list that can be done in 15 minutes probably won't fall victim to this as those games aren't asset flipping games. 

Edited November 22, 2022 by Sergen

[xIRockyRock]

22 minutes ago, Thrillhelm said:

Well the new releases list filters them and by using a filter yourself (sort by price) its obvious they show up. After all the store cant tell if you look for them or not when using the price filter.

Everyone talking about Sony filters these games already. I can’t speak for every store country, but when I enter the store in Germany and go to the very bottom -> show PS5 games it’s a junk fest. Also with PS4 games. And it doesn’t even show new releases like „The Devil in Me“, I can only find it by searching or by recommended.

 

Maybe the store is different in different countries, but the German store is a shit hole of crappy games.

 

Or am I actually using the store wrong? 

Edited November 22, 2022 by xIRockyRock

[PalaceOfLove706]

I don’t agree that the leaderboards should wipe out the shovelware games. It mirrors your PSN rank and should continue being a 1:1 match. Once you hit 999, psnprofiles continues to increase it. 

[Thrillhelm]

7 minutes ago, xIRockyRock said:

Everyone talking about Sony filters these games already. I can’t speak for every store country, but when I enter the store in Germany and go to the very bottom -> show PS5 games it’s a junk fest. Also with PS4 games. And it doesn’t even show new releases like „The Devil in Me“, I can only find it my searching or by recommended.

 

Maybe the store is different in different countries, but the German store is a shit hole of crappy games.

 

Or am I actually using the store wrong? 

Using the German store myself, there are five games shown in each row. Among the first 20  PS5 games shown are 4 pinball games which are not asset flips, and 1 terrible game Tanks vs Tanks. Among the next 20 games are 4 shovelware games and the announced Sakura Succubus 6.

On the next 20 games shown there's 4 shovelware games, that includes the break game as an asset flip. While the shovelware games are present, they do not flood the list.

 

The Devil in Me is in the center of the second row of new releases and highlighted in the "brand new" section. Didnt search for it and it still jumped into my eye.