Sony is getting more and more aggressive with shovelware on the PS Store.
You may recall earlier in the year it delisted hundreds of titles from publisher ThiGames, the company behind “classics” like The Jumping Pizza.
Now it’s axed hundreds more from two more publishers, with their entire catalogues nuked overnight.
Cyprus-based studio Nostra Games’ portfolio was nowhere near as low effort as the abovementioned, but it still spammed Sony’s storefront with almost 700 games over the years, most notably sims.
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Recently it hit headlines for its cat co-op game Ghostly Whiskers, which was accused of being an AI generated knock-off of Haunted Paws.
In a statement on its Discord, a spokesperson for the studio said it didn’t know why its titles had been removed:
“Unfortunately, PS Store has removed our games, and we’re unable to provide an exact reason because it wasn’t shared with us either. For now, we are planning to continue releasing on Nintendo Switch, Xbox, and Steam. This was just as unexpected for us as it was for you, as we had planned to continue releasing games in the coming years, and you’ve already seen some of them, but unfortunately, this is how things turned out. Thank you for your questions, but unfortunately, we are in the dark as well.”
CGI Lab has also had its software axed. It only has a few titles to its name so it’s not clear why its output has been cut, but it released extremely low effort horror games, like Platform Zero and Veins of Darkness.
Sony, it seems, is getting more and more serious about which kind of games it allows on the PS Store.
But with dozens of new titles deployed every day, many with AI generated art assets, it feels like too little too late.
In the case of Nostra Games, we can confidently say the studio probably flew too close to the sun, as it was flogging hundreds of games, all with easy Platinum Trophies, stackable across various different regions.
Its stance on CGI Lab seems less clear, but evidently the platform holder wasn’t comfortable hosting its output anymore.
It’ll be interesting to see whether it continues this crackdown, or even attempts to stop some of these titles at the source.
Surely it’d be easier to block these games from being published in the first place, rather than delisting them at a later date?