It’s still winter, but PlayStation has just done some pretty hefty spring cleaning. Earlier this week, the console maker went on the offensive against the slop that has infected the PlayStation Store over the last few years by removing over 1,000 games from one publisher that specializes in, to put it bluntly, garbage not worth anyone’s time or money. The Jumping saga has finally jumped off the tallest bridge into the coldest ocean. It’s about time PlayStation took this necessary step, but it is just one battle in a broader war.
ThiGames’ titles, the target of this attack, were almost exclusively known for their obscenely low price tags and simple Platinum trophies. This made them easy bait for avid and shameless trophy hunters who wanted to inflate their collection on a budget and in record time. Having a few crappy games like this isn’t the most egregious offense, but the sheer volume of ThiGames’ output made this much more than a minor annoyance. Its games flooded the PlayStation Store through various slapdash reskins and “Turbo” editions. The most dedicated trophy hunters could also utilize both PS4 and PS5 editions of these games in addition to versions from other territories that come with separate trophy lists.
The PlayStation Store Has Been Infected With Slop for Years
And if that wasn’t enough, others started following suit by releasing ultra cheap, low-effort games in an attempt to cater to people who couldn’t refuse a budget-priced and easy Platinum trophy. It’s hard to tell if these developers were following ThiGames or not (as YouTuber Dead Domain pointed out, it’s hard to track some of these deceptive “creators”), but the end result was a storefront flooded with polygonal sludge people would never want to actually play. And a byproduct of having so many of these types of games is how they crowd almost every tab on the store. So it’s not exclusively contained to the actual vanilla storefront because these games choke up sales lists and the section centered around upcoming games, too. It has become all-consuming and inescapable for anyone who wants to briefly cruise around any roulette on the PlayStation Store.
This has had profoundly negative effects on discoverability, which is a crucial part of any storefront. Since so many of the aforementioned tabs are filled with radioactive slime no one wants, how are people going to actually find the good stuff? For example, this current holiday sale has a staggering 181 pages of 24 games each. Page 50 has the cult hit RPG Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen for $5.09, but is anyone going to see it when it’s that far down? Page 98 has more than a few brainrot Tung Sahur titles and other similarly offensive dreck but also a discounted Border Bots VR, an interesting title that plays like a lighter, robot-centric version of Papers, Please in virtual reality. Is anyone going to see the diamonds like that caked in between endless rows of crap? Probably not.
PlayStation should want players to spend their money on actual games they might like instead of Platinum trophy bait. The $2.99 spent on a terrible game would be better used on a discounted games like Hotline Miami Collection or Mortal Shell that come in at the same price. Great or excellent titles like these are always at rock-bottom prices each week, but it’s not always a breeze to find them. Surfacing more nourishing experiences like this would get people more into the medium and potentially make them more likely to buy similar games in the future. These bad games are junk food mixed with poison and aren’t going to get anyone to like the medium even more.
Developers of more thoughtful games have spoken about this because they have a lot to lose. IGN’s report from February 2025 broke this issue down and featured a few anonymous creators, one of whom summed up the heartbreak of having to compete in this environment.
“If people are just pumping crap into the system, you get pushed down the list,” they said. “Any list. The systems are being overwhelmed and you’re going to get pushed out of there. I’ve been working on my game for six years, someone else has been working on their game for six months and makes a dozen copies of it… it’s just crushing.”
Nintendo Needs to Follow Suit With the eShop
Junk has flooded every platform, but Nintendo has also done a terrible job at addressing it. The eShop on both Switch platforms is an absolute mess that’s awash with much of the same types of sewage that infects PlayStation systems. However, it’s even weirder on the Switch because there are no trophies or achievements to get. Regardless, it makes the store unpleasant to navigate and suffers from the same issues as PlayStation’s consoles. It’s even more ironic with Nintendo, as its seal of approval pulled the video game industry out of a shovelware-induced crash in the 1980s. Focusing on quality and fewer games meant people could trust video games again and something like that needs to come back if there’s going to be any sort of meaningful pushback against these wastes of server space.
And it’s only going to get worse. Generative AI has made the path to creating slop even easier since it automates even more of the process and allows shiftier devs to lie even more blatantly and in record time. The overwhelming amount of smut, trophy bait, copyright infringements, and asset flips can now have flashier key art slapped on top of them to help better hide the lies they hold just beneath the surface. The sheer amount of this disgusting, soulless “artwork” present on any random tab of the PlayStation Store is depressing. Generative AI facilitates grifting, and the grift here was already pretty strong.
PlayStation already tightened the rules once in late 2022 and purged some games in early 2025 (seemingly in response to the aforementioned IGN report), but it can’t wait that long to do another and the company needs to be relentlessly pressured into doing more culls. Thousands of worthless games still clog up spaces on the PlayStation Store and waste everyone’s time and some people’s money. New rules and stricter guidelines might be tricky to nail down, yet they are a must when the flood of AI trash is already suffocating so many digital storefronts. There are too many excellent games coming out almost every single week vying for everyone’s attention and they shouldn’t have to compete with half-assed asset flips that unfairly game the system to steal slots they should never have in the first place.
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