Removing games from a store can be a good thing, as Sony just did nuke a bunch of games from its PlayStation Store. The context? They were all shovelware.
Most of the games banned, in fact, come from a single developer called ThiGames, the beautiful minds behind The Jumping Burrito. And The Jumping Pizza. And also The Jumping Taco.
Yeah, we may have a pattern here.
As per GamesIndustry.biz, neither Sony nor ThiGames have commented on the matter, but hey, if it serves as an effort to make the PS Store more fresh on its offers, I say good riddance.
Shovelware hurts brand integrity, but companies have ways to fight it
“Shovelware” is the technical name applied to digital applications that add nothing to the user experience — metaphorically and literally, they’re there to occupy space and, in this case, turn a quick buck to its publishers with minimal effort. Thus the above examples of “Jumping Whatever”: they’re essentially reused skins of the same game, same mechanic, with little to no change or innovation.
And they cost companies more than money, most of the time. You see, shovelware is easily noticeable, and its immediate effect is driving customers away, due to them soon realizing that the company has nothing quite useful to offer.
So it costs storefront owners a good amount of money: while we couldn’t find data on the overall cost for the gaming industry, shovelware practices tend to flood marketplace with reusable, cheap-to-purchase assets like textures and sound pieces, and applying them to several titles with no difference among each other.
According to Alinea Analytics, Steam titles collectively earned $16.2 billion in the first 11 months of 2025, already surpassing the $15 billion generated in all of 2024. However, for the individual developer, the experience can be rather difficult.
Legitimate creators report that genuine games are often buried under hundreds of “AI slop” titles—according to one developer’s estimate, roughly 800 shovelware titles can hide 100 genuine games in a single store section. This saturation forces consumers to navigate through a lot of weird, often garbage-looking titles in order to find actual content.
An IGN report from last February even points out that they get in stores by a mix of just baaaarely grazing guidelines for publishing and, more recently, a lot of AI to make cheap costs even cheaper. One developer stated a full game could be made and published — with pricing — in just under 10 minutes. Would it get taken down? Yes, most likely. But by the time a store owner gets to it, 50 other games have already flooded the store as well.
According to data from GameDiscoverCo, Steam released 14,535 new games in 2023, which was 2.97 times more than the combined total of Nintendo Switch (2,608), PlayStation (1,335), and Xbox (945) for that same year. This volume has only accelerated; according to SteamDB, the number of releases climbed to 18,533 in 2024 and reached a record 20,015 in 2025. By early 2024, Steam’s total catalog encompassed 79,919 games, dwarfing the collections of the Switch (11,600), PlayStation (7,288), and Xbox (5,808).
Still quoting SteamDB analytics, however, nearly half of the titles released in 2025 received fewer than 10 reviews, with 2,200 games receiving no reviews at all and 7,100 receiving between one and nine. According to reports cited by Kotaku, approximately 80% (or 14,951) of the games launched in 2024 were barely played or purchased. Only a small fraction of games find significant success; according to SteamDB, only 6.2% of 2025 releases surpassed the threshold of 500 reviews, a slight decrease from the 7.2% success rate seen in 2024.
Technical curation and “confidence metrics” are tools of defense
According to Steamworks documentation, Valve restricts features like trading cards and achievement counts until a game reaches specific sales and engagement metrics to ensure it is being used by real players rather than bots.
Meanwhile, Microsoft utilizes a more hands-on vetting process. Its “Top Failing Console Test Cases” lists 38% of game rejections are due to “Title Stability” (XR-001) and 14% are due to “Title Integrity” issues. This rigorous curation results in a more concentrated user base; according to platform data, the top 100 games on Xbox (either from Game Pass or otherwise) account for 78% of the platform’s daily active users (DAU).
While Sony does not have a properly-named system in place — at least, nothing that the company markets around, anyway — it seems to be picking up the pace, with ThiGames losing most if not all of its titles on PS Store being a good indication that the PlayStation maker is on top of the problem.
And Nintendo…well, it’s Nintendo. While it probably does take the measurements seen at Sony, data on its eShop are very secretive, so it is impossible to state how this situation is on their end — although it was one of the most named storefronts in the past to suffer from this.
