Following a report last week highlighting the slop currently infesting digital game storefronts, it seems Sony has started to remove some egregious shovelware featuring AI-generated art from its PlayStation Network Store.
On February 3, IGN published an in-depth report about how digital stores, like Steam and the eShop, have been flooded over the last year with games that often use a combination of AI-generated images, misleading titles, and fake screenshots to reel in buyers. This is what we around these parts call slop. And as we’ve written about before, digital stores are filled with this crap. But thankfully, probably due to the IGN report, Sony has stepped in and removed some of the gunk filling up the PSN storefront.
As spotted by Eurogamer and TrueTrophies, sometime last week Sony quietly removed many games published by RandomSpin Games, a company that has become notorious for pumping out PSN slop.
In 2024 alone RandomSpin published over 35 games, sometimes releasing multiple titles in a single month. Many of these games featured the telltale trademarks of slop, including screenshots and covers that looked like they were created using AI. Among the company’s “games” were titles such as Difficult Climbing Game and Bodycam Shooter PS4. Now many of these games have been delisted by Sony, though it appears some of RandomSpin’s titles still remain on the PSN store.
Kotaku has reached out to Sony for more information.
In the IGN report from last week, anonymous devs and people within the games industry shared how the PlayStation Store’s rules and lack of oversight make it easier to for slop to be sold on PS4 and PS5 than on some other storefronts, like the Microsoft Store on Xbox.
However, the report indicated that the Nintendo store might be the easiest target for scammers, with one developer telling the outlet, “Nintendo is probably the easiest to scam. Once I’m in the door, I could make ‘Fart Fart Boobie Fart: The Game’ and maybe it would eventually get taken down, but it’s so odd.”
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