Sony's Purge on PS5 Shovelware May Now Have Hit a Legit Indie Dev 1
Image: Push Square

Update []:

Sony has seemingly admitted it made a mistake by cancelling its publishing arrangement with indie dev Ternox as part of its ongoing shovelware purge.

While the platform holder has made painstaking efforts to rid the PS Store of rubbish, the Ukrainian studio appeared to unfairly get caught in the crossfire.

Looking at its software lineup, there was nothing particularly egregious that should have resulted in its titles getting removed. Its upcoming game Stonks-9800: Stock Market Simulator has received rave reviews in early access on Steam.

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That title will now once again target the PS5 when finished as Ternox’s publishing arrangement with PlayStation has now been reinstated.

It seems like there’s no bad blood from the indie, and it just wants to crack on with releasing its games to as many people as possible.

Sony must do much better, though.

While I appreciate errors can happen, and I do think it’s good that it’s committed to cleaning up the PS Store, it’s obvious this dev was unfairly targeted – and it took articles like this one to raise attention to the issue.

Original Story: Sony has been ridding the PS Store of shovelware, erasing entire publisher catalogues from its virtual plaza.

While I think this news has been broadly well received, I’ve always cautioned that legit devs may one day get caught up in the crossfire.

And it looks like that’s happened to Ukrainian outfit Ternox, who’s been told its upcoming text-based adventure Stonks-9800: Stock Market Simulator can’t release on PS5.

The game, available in Early Access on Steam already, has attracted ‘Overwhelmingly Positive’ reviews since debuting in 2023. That’s based on over 1,000 ratings, too.

The studio has also been told that its entire output will be purged from the PS Store in the coming days.

While its games do appear to have fairly easily unlockable Trophies, there are only nine of them and they don’t look unanimously terrible to me.

Nexoria: Dungeon Rogue Heroes looks like a basic pixel art dungeon crawler, while Retro Highway is a pretty straightforward Super Hang-On clone.

Other titles include side-scrolling shooter Unichrome: A 1-Bit Unicorn Adventure and Fox’s Zen House, an idle clicker that uses the touchpad.

Many of these games have a score of over 4.00 on the PS Store, and none of them look egregiously awful like The Jumping Pizza and other obvious copy-and-paste shovelware.

The dev says it incorporated many of the unique features of the DualSense into its games, including haptic feedback.

Looking through its lineup, the only game I think may have fallen short of Sony’s new guidelines is Finger Fitness, which you may recall was an easy Platinum Trophy game designed around the adaptive triggers.

Obviously, I can see the platform holder’s point of view here, but I’d still consider this game a little more imaginative than some of the other shovelware on Sony’s system. This one sits comfortably next to the My Name Is Mayo series in my opinion.

Still, if the platform holder has a problem with this game, couldn’t it just remove it on its own?

Ternox says it hasn’t received a reason for its publishing account’s termination from Sony. I’ll try to contact the company and see if it’ll tell me more.

For what it’s worth, Ternox says it’s still committed to bringing the well-regarded Stonks-9800 to Switch and Xbox.

[source x.com]