The PlayStation Store’s greatest games are surrounded by the worst slop you’ve ever seen

While the critical delight of Astro Bot is currently plastered across the entirety of the PlayStation Store right now, Sony’s digital marketplace is worse than it has ever been before. After years of complaints, low-effort, SEO-fuelled games are still flooding the PlayStation store without issue, and the rise of AI has only made things worse.

Ever since the infamous release of shovelware legend Life of Black Tiger in 2017, the rise of low-quality games has only increased. While AAA releases like the amazing Astro Bot adorn the front of the PS Store, the store’s newest releases fight for dominance against a wave of slop.

What’s happening to the PlayStation Store?

While Sony’s digital marketplace always highlights the biggest new releases on the platform, it takes less than a minute to find games that just a few years ago would never have made their way onto a console.

Sorting through the “Latest” category on the PS Store on any day immediately brings the slop to the service. Games like Visa Control: USA Border Simulator, The Jumping Donut and Correct Picture are placed alongside passionate games like the SUNSOFT is Back! Collection.

Even worse, the PlayStation Store’s horde of asset flips and SEO bait games outnumber actual new releases ten-to-one. Entire rows of the storefront’s latest catalogue is filled with games like Bowling in a Skate Park, Axe Ace and Boom Robots.

Not only are these games truly bottom-of-the-barrel, rejected-from-Gamejolt level titles, but they don’t even use original artwork for their featured images. For example, the aforementioned Bowling in a Skatepark, priced at a whopping £1.69, uses an AI-generated picture of a bowling ball running away on a skateboard while holding screaming skittles. Of course, the actual gameplay doesn’t match this at all.

These titles are still coming en masse to PS4 and PS5 with some even available to wishlist and follow. Airport Police Contraband Simulator – Border Patrol, a game scheduled to release this year, asks players to “uncover the hidden world of illicit trade in an international airport”. The game uses AI art to promote itself and the in-game screenshots boast hilarious typos such as “Cantch the Intruder”, “Welocome to Serenity Skies Airport”, and “Cantch the Contrabandist!!!”

And the offensive content

Even if the countless AI-using, barely functional games flooding the PlayStation Store doesn’t upset you, maybe the content of some of those games will. One game in particular stood out within PlayStation’s most recent releases—Street Survival: Homeless Simulator, a game that puts players in the role of a homeless man surviving in a city.

“It is a copy of Bum Simulator, which has spawned a weird sub-genre of homeless survival-management games.”

Instead of being a thoughtful title about the struggles of homelessness, the “realistic” game makes players beg for money and “engage in street fights where only the strongest survive”. At the time of writing, the game has 52 reviews on the store and sits at a rating of 1.54 stars.

Just a few years ago, the PlayStation Store was locked down to the point where even proper indie games struggled to launch. Now, the floodgates are opened with very little, if any, moderation for the products allowed to launch on PS4 and PS5.

Sony isn’t alone

It’s not just PlayStation that has this issue, either, although it does seem to be the most prevalent. Nintendo Switch’s eShop storefront is also filled with AI garbage, keyword-designed titles that only exist to try and squeeze a few bucks out of gullible kids.

However, while still present, this issue does exist less on Xbox which has its own dedicated ID@Xbox platform for indie games. While some slop does make its way through, the large majority of games are still “real games”. Although, with actual indie developers struggling to get their games on Xbox as of late, maybe that is part of a bigger issue.

At the end of the day, PlayStation’s doors are fully open and the sewage is flowing through the PlayStation Store like a scammer-run game jam. Anything and everything goes, as long as it doesn’t flag some banned words and phrases. Maybe this process helps some indie devs make their splash on PlayStation like they couldn’t before, but with asset flip, AI sludge filling up the store, discoverability is next to impossible.

There are only two courses of action for Sony: inaction or moderation, and, so far, the former isn’t working.