The reality of gaming is that it is mostly made up of mediocre and bad video games, a handful of good titles, others close to perfection, and those with legendary status. For decades, this was not so visible due to the physical format, but with the arrival of digital platforms, growth was exponential and all of them were filled with garbage, in terms known in the sector as shovelware. On mobile phones the battle is lost, but on consoles it could be something else and Sony has taken an important step in that direction.

Sony and PlayStation declare war on shovelware

Various reports indicated that Sony and PlayStation will update the guidelines for publishing video games on the PlayStation Store, with the aim of ending, or at least significantly reducing, the amount of shovelware present on the platform. If at some point you have given yourself the task of wandering through the offer of titles in the PlayStation digital store (as well as the Xbox Store and Switch eShop) you will have noticed that there are endless unknown, low-priced video games and some that seem like a clone of proposals that have been recognized in the industry.

Poor quality games will not be published on PlayStation Store

Well, that shovelware created to get money from the unwary could have its days numbered on the PlayStation Store. A Comicbook report shares an excerpt from the statement sent by Sony where it gives an account of the changes that will be made to be able to publish games on the PS Store: “Sony Interactive Entertainment strives to ensure that customers can search and discover the full range of experiences on PlayStation , and that partners have a fair means of being discovered. When partners overcrowd or ‘spam’ the PlayStation Store with many variations of the same type of content, it can negatively affect both the customer experience and that of other partners.”

Subsequently, PlayStation points out that the banning measure to what it considers shovelware will apply as follows: “products whose functionality and | or assets are copied or are not significantly different from products already published on PlayStation Store, regardless of the registry editor are considered spammy and repetitive. If a game is assigned these tags, it will not be allowed to release on PlayStation Store. This also applies to multiple product concepts and variants, published by individual partners, that have duplicate, differentiated functionality or experiences only for minor variations of functionality or assets”

Finally, PlayStation reported that it will pay attention to the trophy registry because (finally) they realized that some of these shovelware titles met this publication requirement by offering trophies for simple actions and not for completing a challenge.

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