Shovelware is a bigger problem than ever – platform holders need a robust response | Opinion

Sony’s PlayStation Store is a slightly tidier place this week. The company delisted around a thousand SKUs (which probably translates to a little over a hundred actual games) from a single developer in a single sweep – but it’s not clear whether this was an isolated case, or if perhaps it indicates a more rigorous attitude to shovelware from the platform holder.

We should hope that it’s the latter. Shovelware is a problem as old as the industry itself – there have always been companies ready to make a quick buck by churning out terrible games that are carbon-copied asset swaps on a single template. However, since digital distribution brought down some of the barriers to access (which has overall been a very positive thing for the medium), shovelware chancers have swarmed over the barricades in unheard-of numbers.

This has been disastrous for discoverability for actual games, and there’s little that provokes quite so much despair in a small developer than seeing their lovingly crafted passion project knocked off the New and Trending lists on storefronts by a sea of cheap knock-offs, badly drawn pornography, and asset-swapped trash.

Every advancement or improvement in discoverability – and they’re few and far between as it is – faces three steps back as the flood of shovelware and even downright fakes makes the challenge ever greater. Unfortunately, what’s on the horizon is even worse. Whatever your views on generative AI’s uses in game development, there’s absolutely no question that it’s a shovelware vendor’s fantasy come to life. Churning out half-baked games that look just professional enough to fool enough people to eke out a small profit is currently becoming faster, cheaper, and easier than ever before.

That looming crisis makes it all the more remarkable – and troubling – that platform holders have, up until now, shown almost zero willingness to even acknowledge the issue of shovelware, let alone tackle it. Sony and Nintendo, both companies which once held reasonably high bars to entry on their platforms, now permit a bewildering amount of absolutely shameless shovelware. Sony’s delistings this week barely scraped enough off the tip of the iceberg to chill a decent drink.

The problem, of course, is the same one that we see with social media companies and their ilk; actual content moderation is hard and involves having to employ human beings to make informed judgements, and they don’t want to do that. Far too many companies have become tremendously comfortable with the notion that they should just let their services rot and dramatically worsen the experience for their customers, if the alternative is having to actually hire staff to do proper jobs.

That is absolutely the only alternative, by the way. There’s no algorithmic detection process that will pick out shovelware, and no, AI isn’t going to rescue us from this crisis that it’s currently busy making worse. Any algorithmic or AI model based net cast to try to remove shovelware is inevitably going to also catch all manner of legitimate small indie games, retro re-releases, niche genres like visual novels and god knows what else; either that, or it’ll be tuned to be so loose as to be meaningless entirely.

Yet this challenge is one that’s not going to go away, and it’s an especially problematic one for console platform holders. Their whole pitch to consumers revolves around offering a walled garden, and promising to act as smart, careful curators of those walls. In recent years, they’ve largely ignored that duty; the gardens are choked with weeds. At least Steam makes no such claim – its users know that it’s an open platform and that means there’s always going to be lots to wade through before you find the gem you’re looking for. Sony and Nintendo, however, tacitly promise to curate a gem collection for you, then hand you a pair of waders and tell you to hunt through the muck for them.

I’m not here to litigate the argument about open versus closed platforms for the millionth time. There’s a place for both of them and it’s okay for consumers to have a preference for one over the other, even if I see the irony in the insistence that consumers should be able to choose a platform that offers less choice. However, the argument for closed platforms becomes extremely unconvincing when their gatekeepers are asleep on the job. Why should any consumer consent to being locked in by a platform holder that’s not willing to actually curate the walled garden and keep out the weeds?

This isn’t to say that keeping out shovelware is easy. The difficulty of defining and policing it is precisely why it demands a human touch, not a half-baked algorithm. In the case of the developer whose games were removed by Sony this week, there wasn’t much margin for interpretation; their games, which had reportedly earned around $10 million on the store, were egregious cases by any measure and largely designed to let people pay to boost their trophy scores in a matter of minutes. In other cases, an asset swap or a bait-and-switch game can be trickier to detect; there’s absolutely a need for experienced, well-trained staff to assess claims of shovelware, not to mention for carefully written criteria that are fair to legitimate developers while still rigorously protecting consumers and the platform itself.

The alternative is already a bad situation – with legitimate titles outside the famous AAA space struggling to distinguish themselves from often very professional but nonetheless completely unscrupulous shovelware creators – and is going to turn into an outright disaster when AI turns the firehose of such content into a flash flood. The potential genuinely exists for digital storefronts to become totally untenable for discovery and promotion of games from anything other than major publishers, essentially destroying the very benefit they initially promised.

There’s no quick or cheap solution – but perhaps Sony’s action this week, if it genuinely reflects a hardening of attitudes rather than just a dispute with a single developer, is a ray of hope that this situation might not go unaddressed forever.