Sony Quietly Pulls ‘Eslop’ Titles in Face of Mounting Pressure – Push Square

GuestGuestLogin | Sign UpPush SquareGuestLogin or Sign UpDraining the swampLast week, IGN published a report on the increasing amount of “eslop” cluttering up digital storefronts, a cause we here at Push Square were only too willing to throw our own, only slightly less formidable weight behind (at least, as far as the PS Store is concerned). Under this mounting pressure, Sony appears to have delisted several shovelware titles, mostly from developer RandomSpin Games, which released a new game almost monthly.Between the two, not much happens on the PS Store that gets by TrueTrophies and PSNProfiles, which noted the removal of some but not nearly all of the samey-looking, misleading simulation games from shady-sounding publishers and developers (thanks, Eurogamer).The timing is rather interesting, and we prefer to think it’s due to the power of proper journalism. However, the great work is still far from over. RandomSpin, for example, has had its (no doubt eagerly anticipated) Supermarket Simulator Pro pulled. However, dozens of Supermarket Simulator games alone are still on the PS Store, allegedly from different developers, and share strikingly similar gameplay mechanics and assets.’I could make Fart Fart Boobie Fart: The Game’Are you glad to see some small progress being made in improving the usability of the PS Store? Have you ever picked up one of these “eslop” games, and if so, what did you think? Let us know in the comments section below.[source truetrophies.com, via eurogamer.net]About Khayl AdamKhayl Adam is Push Square’s roving Australian correspondent, a reporter tasked with scouring the internet for the richest, most succulent PlayStation stories. With six years of experience as a freelance journalist and mercenary wordsmith, RPGs are his first great love, but strategy and tactics games are a close second, genres in which he is only too happy to specialize.Comments 48At least it’s something. Hopefully QA will come back on PS6.”Sony quietly” is the problem here.they have been quietly overseeing their worst console generation on a first party front for gamers ever, whilst price gouging and raking in profits moving more and more anti consumer each year.We need a quiet purge of the entire top tier of leadership.All 3 consoles suffer hard from this sadly.I read somewhere that a lot of these developers don’t even have PS5 kits and technically shouldn’t be able to publish these games in the first place.EDIT: Sex Shop Simulator and Hentai Shop Simulator are goneBut how am I going to play Jumping Donut nowI mostly browse a bit through the main page of the store, where popular and new titles are recommended, and lists of indies and first party and stuff like that. I guess i’ve never thoroughly looked through the PS store, cause i’ve genuinely never come across these types of games.Keep it coming@DennisReynolds the slop on xbox is pretty well hidden unless you go searching for it. The slop on playstation always pops up in those huge 2000+ games sales. Switch however…. you can preorder slop there.I wish they would purge all these offenders. Its a deterrent to buy anything. I get sick of trying to weed through themI just took a look and all of those “Jumping [food]” trophy games are still on there. Those things are an absolute embarrassment.Both PS5 and Switch get a ton of shovelware. Makes it difficult to actually find anything new that’s worth getting.Well, soon there will be even more eslop games, with previous xbox exclusives like Starfield and allThis is the future, AI generated ‘games’ delivered at such a rate that it causes a massive fatberg that stinks up online storefronts so badly that we’ll be begging for the closed shop of the old Wii Shop Channel.The fact that Sony is doing this “quietly”, the fact that they are doing it reluctantly, proves that somewhere down the line they are making good money from these games.I blame the trophy hunters who will “shovel” up these games for a cheap easy platinum gong. If they stopped buying them then maybe this kack will cease to exist. Maybe this is why there was a 24hr outage so that nobody would notice the removal of these “fatburgs” clogging the system and get upset.@LifeGirl I bet they make a tidy sum from all the trophy hunters out there. It’s almost an esport in its own right.@Frmknst I’ll give you a like as its the first time you’ve made me grin.Thankfully Ive never seen any in the ‘Pro Enhanced’ tab, which is my primary go to now..@Rich33 yeah now you’ve said it..I can see pro versions of “pink lady with a gun” on its way right now 🤣@Beetlebum91 yeah, switch is the worst for it by far. Doesn’t help that the store loads at a snails pace either. I just use Dekudeals now to see all the stuff on sale and filter it etc.@Northern_munkey …..with added ray tracing lol@DennisReynolds 1st of all its always sunny is my favorite show, excellent profile name & pic lol.Second, I agree the shovel ware is frustrating. I find that it’s much more abundantly noticable on PlayStation than Xbox. At least for me anyways, the thing that frustrates me the most is when trying to find legitimate DECENT indies to play on PlayStation and Xbox you’ve got a few thousand that are blatant copycat eslop and it’s a bummer because true gems are likely never to be seen amidst the eslop.Eslop is most definitely a thing on Xbox but I guess the difference is the sheer amount of categories that exist within the Xbox store allows user to scroll through or bypass a lot of eslop. What I mean by this is when you open the Microsoft store on Xbox you have multiple options: top new games, games coming soon, top paid games, top free games and optimized for Series X|S. Upon clicking on those categories you’ll get most known games but as you go deeper you’ll find the eslop.Then when you click on deals you have even more sub categories: wishlist deals, special offers, Xbox game specials, deals for you, deals with gamepass and most played game deals. This is the section I browse the most as now I’m 30 I no longer need to buy games day one so I wait for sales 95% of the time. Certain games like GTA 6 I will buy day one or if there’s something that I feel is must have I will buy day one, for example I bought Indiana Jones and the Great Circle day one on Xbox. The same goes for PlayStation exclusives like Spiderman 2, God of War Ragnarok and Ghost of Tsushima I purchased them all day one, but most other games I typically purchase on sale, for example last week I bought Assassin’s Creed Mirage Digital Deluxe Edition on sale for $11 on the Xbox store. It wasn’t a game I needed to play day one but it was a game I wanted to play at some point so I waited until it was cheap.I think just the way the Microsoft store is laid out I don’t see shovel ware as much as on PlayStation. When I click on PS5 games and start scrolling through them it’s usually a mix of known games and a bunch of eslop.I really wish Microsoft and Sony would do their due diligence & sift through the junk games, get rid of them in order to give legitimate GOOD indie gems the limelight they deserve. We all know there’s good games out there that aren’t on anyone’s radar but finding them has become a lot harder as this generation has gone on.Happy gaming ✌️In my best fantasy slop voice – ‘Eeeeew, all the trashy games are gone from the PS store. Where am I gonna get my easy platinum fix?!’ Somebody buys it…The worst aspect of trophy hunting has been the proliferation of these games. Glad to see it’s being noticed somewhat.@Northern_munkey I have come across the developer of those lady in the pink leotard with a gun games and they post about their games with passion, it makes me think they’re not actually a shovelware dev but just very amateur.Which shows Sony would have to be careful when separating shovelware from amateur titles, like my own game Trails and Traces.“The timing is rather interesting” …indeed. Hopefully not related to the PSN downtime either? There was one comment I read that proposed (in jest) that it was a disgruntled eslop dev taking their revenge out on Sony. 😂@BecauseBecause 👍@Logonogo if Jumping Muffin gets removed we RIOT@LogicStrikesAgain Yeah I just wishlist stuff I see either announced at PS showcases or talked about by pundits. I never browse anymore, it’s a waste of time@BecauseBecause OK I bit and had a quick squiz at your game on youtube. Fair play to you for actually creating something (I couldn’t to be honest) but even though I found it unintentionally hilarious I’ll think I will give it a pass.@LogicStrikesAgain I like to look at All Deals but it’s impossible to navigate since all of the shovelware is listed at like 99p, and then at high points they start mixing in with actual good games so it’s easy to miss them.I’ve resorted to a third party price tracking site where I’m able to hide specific games. It takes forever but after (years..) of using the site I can pretty much immediately see the good stuff. And even then there’s always 20 to 30 more shovelware I need to hide. I shouldn’t have to do any of this.@KundaliniRising333 didn’t that exact purge just happen though?The amount of filter gymnastics I have to pull to to get out the garbage is unreal. Hopefully this makes it easier. There’s a guy out there making games called “I’m in love with your dead grandma” or something like that and every time I see those games I want to punch that guy in the face.I hope they have some kind of vision of what the PS Store should look like by PS6This is even worse on Steam, and makes it difficult to search for titles on sale by price: low-high on Steamdb because it will just result in page after page of this malady.I rarely look through the PlayStation games sales, @Beetlebum91, entirely because there are simply too many games in the sale! To look even remotely carefully through so many games takes well over an hour, and then I might not even buy anything! Recently, there was a sale with 6000+ games on sale. I mean, just how long would it take to look through that lot…?@Northern_munkey as I said, amateur made! My pc only game Detective Boiled-Hard on steam is better, because it’s intentionally funny. I have made vastly superior graphics since then but no finished game to show.@LogicStrikesAgain Open PS store, open Deals tab, filter Full Games and Bundles, change sorting Cheapest first and voila… you have looooong list of slopwareDeveloper here. The one suggestion I would give platform holders: make it compulsory for devs to release a demo of their game.Underwhelming games won’t sell if people can try them first. And if they don’t sell, they will not keep popping up.For platform holders, this would neither be arbitrary nor time-consuming.One odd thing I’ve noticed is these games stay at the top of “new games by release” a week+ after they released, despite newer games being listed after them. Not sure how that happens, but it’s annoying.It’s about time, these games are absolutely stupid and are not worth your money. My son writes games and pretty decent ones and can’t get them published on PS store. He says there’s just too much red tape! Somehow these people (companies) get these stupid shallow games on the store…nuts… I agree drain the swamp!Could you focus on Steam next?! lol@SanukGames A lot of the shovelware is $1-2 games that just give you easy trophies (achievements). The people buying them don’t care about the quality of the game, so demos are not a solution to those.Part of the problem is that Sony was actually giving rewards points for trophies at one time. They have since stopped that, but seemingly someone out there still cares about trophy numbers enough to still be buying this crap.I used to look at the store every single week, but after all that crap got added in I only look at it when I come across a game that interests me that I found through other means.@Frmknst Starfield is pretty good but it does feel a bit old school. I enjoyed it and it’ll probably sell very well on Playstation. Redfall is another game that is a pretty solid shooter now that I expect to sell pretty good if it ever comes to Playstation. I downloaded Redfall over the summer and had a great time with it, the art style is very unique. I expect it to review well on Playstation if it was released today.While the subtitle is accurate in this case, the phrase “draining the swamp” makes me cringe Everytime I hear it.@Fiendish-Beaver oh it takes over an hour, I’ve done it a few times to see any indie games I may have missed. Sometimes it pays off, usually not though. 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