For the second time this year, Sony is removing a whole bunch of Shovel Games
The PlayStation Store was recently cleared of around 700 games. The fact that you probably don’t have to worry about this now is due to the type of games that have been affected – so-called Shovel Games. The titles belong to publishersNostra Games and CGI Lab, with the majority of the removed games belonging to Nostra.
What are shovel games (also known as shovelware)These are games that are produced and duplicated with little effort and often with the use of AI. This mass of usually not particularly high-quality games is then published in digital stores in order to make a profit through low prices and low production costs.
Sony cleans up, Nostra wants to continue
AsPush Squarereports, a good 700 games from Nostra Games and a small number of titles from CGI Lab were removed from the PlayStation Store all at once.
The studio published the following message on Nostra’s Discord:
Unfortunately, the PS Store has removed our games from stock, and we can’t give an exact reason as it hasn’t been communicated to us either. For now, we plan to continue publishing games for Nintendo Switch, Xbox and Steam. This was as unexpected for us as it was for you, as we were planning on releasing more games in the coming years – some of which you’ve already seen – but unfortunately this is the way it turned out. Thank you for your questions, but unfortunately we are also in the dark.
In fact, there has been no official statement from Sony. However, since the company already threw out over 1,000 games from the German publisher ThiGames in January, which also fall into the Shovel Games category, there is a pattern here.
Sony is removing the cheap mass-produced goods from the store. However, the message from Nostra shows the intention to continue offering these games, initially only on Steam, in the Nintendo eShop and in the Microsoft Store.
Why is there a market for such games at all? Shovel games are often peppered with simple trophies. So if you want to decorate your profile with lots of platinum, you can do so quite cheaply. Unfortunately, these games also bloat the stores and prevent good games from small studios from getting the attention they deserve.
