Community
Login
Sign up
  • Replies 10 replies
  • Subscribers 59 subscribers
  • Views 174 views
  • Users 0 members are here
Options
Related
< Back to Discussion Groups

Playstation is banning anything it deems shovelware from the store

Figen
Offline

According the the article from Dexdotexe, Sony has sent out an email to all developers with guidance on the type of games that they will be allowing on their platform from this point onwards.

  • Games that have copied, placeholder or bought assets and haven't bothered to make them "meaningfully different" than another title on the store
  • Games that are essentially carbon copies of similar games, by the same developer or others. This one only seems to target solo / small devs, if that's what I understand by "Published by individual partners".
  • "Trophy farming" games are no longer allowed

What are your thoughts on this? It's potentially a great change, as it'll stop the Playstation store getting filled with shovelware like mobile app stores, and some places like Steam are starting to get filled with. On the other hand, who knows how aggressive they'll be? Will a game be rejected because it uses a single tree in the far distance that another developer has bought from the Unity asset store, or will only the worst offenders be impacted?

Full article: dexdotexe.com/.../

  • I say good! There are loads of broken and complete trash or copied games on steam, wish they would do the same!

  • Offline

    I hope the that the banning system wil not change anything regarding mew ideas or possible innovative games that haven't enough support from publishers :/

  • Offline

    Good, I've seen tons of these kinds of games on the store lately. Games with the exact same gameplay as each other just with one word difference in the title and a different main character

  • Offline

    As much as some games can be similar, like Metroidvanias and such it does bug me when somethings are pretty much carbon copies and there's 8 of them. It's one thing that used to really annoy me about the steam store whenevwr there were sales, you had to hunt through 276 indie games that all looked the same to see anything you might like or a A tier game you wanted. Made me hate the sales, I'd just google the game I wanted and looked it anyone had it on sale. Maybe it will be an incentive to make a decent effort instead of a cheap impression.

  • Offline

    It sounds great to have standards that games have to be meaningfully different, but games with differing themes will appeal to different gamers, so on that front, it seems like it could be doing a disservice to gamers and developers. I am annoyed by the idea that it seems to target small and solo devs, that's never a good look for a company.

  • Offline in reply to Pauline D.

    Singling out solo developers is never a great thing. Small teams or solo devs have it hard enough to break into the industry, and putting extra red tape in front of them can only hurt things. Luckily, it looks like the rules they are putting in place are more targeted at the "content farm" game developers, where they'll release the same Unity demo they whipped up in 5 minutes over and over.

  • Let’s hope it’s done in a fair & sensible way, then it may be for the good, but if not it could stifle the field 

  • Offline

    Seems a good move from what I used to see on Steam, would be a pity to deal with that much poor choice. For pc is actually not that bad but for the console environment could become quite overflowing

  • Offline

    I think it's a great thing thing to have a curated store. I just hope smaller indie games don't get rejected because of it. Steam could really use a system like that but due to the amount of games coming out each day it's almost impossible