It seems gamers have found the first big stinker of the year in Teamkill Media’s Code Violet, with discourse around it focused almost entirely on just how bad it is. By all accounts, it’s a short, shallow, thrown-together buggy mess of a game that doesn’t even come close to the same galaxy as the game it claims to draw most of its inspiration from: Dino Crisis. However, something curious has come out about it: the reason why it’s a PlayStation exclusive. With this tidbit in hand we finally get an imporant piece of the puzzle regarding the current state of the PlayStation Store.

Put simply, there’s strong reason to believe that the main reason that Code Violet is on PlayStation 5 and only PlayStation 5 is because of how much more difficult is to get a refund out of Sony than Steam or Xbox. The developers haven’t commented on the claim so far, but it makes a degree of sense considering the game’s poor quality and $50 price tag.

Teamkill Media did try to get ahead of that claim a year ago by tweeting that it wouldn’t do a PC version because it didn’t want people modding “vulgar versions” of the game’s main character…only to then announce a special edition a few days later, of which the main feature was several revealing (dare I say even “vulgar”) outfits for said character. Yeah. Oh, and then followed up that announcement with several trailers that did nothing but show off that characters, uh, “assets.” Uh-huh. Really took a solid moral stand there, didn’t ya?

I’m getting off track though. The real issues are Sony’s awful refund policy and the deluge of slop games that have been clogging up the PlayStation Store for over 10 years now! Seriously! It’s gotten so bad that the crap takes up half the landing page at times! You don’t even have to go looking for it! It’s right there, AI generated thumbnails and everything!

There are so many knock-offs, namealikes, assets flips, bait-and-switches and absolutely unplayable messes like Code Violet infesting the service that you can’t even browse for anything anymore outside of the curated sale lists, and even those are starting to get infiltrated by the slop! For all the supposed requirements Sony has for pushing updates, patches and such, it’s ridiculously lax when it comes to what actually makes it into the store.

It’s like 2010’s era Steam now, but without the necessarily generous refund policy that keeps people from getting taken advantage of by this stuff. Seriously, how is it that the service has actually gotten worse in the years since the whole Life of Black Tiger debacle? I’d say that hopefully this serves as a call-to-action to Sony to revisit its refund policy at the very least, but then that would probably be expecting way too much. Just be darn careful to research anything you find on there these days.

Never just click “purchase” (which it shouldn’t even say since that’s not actuall what you’re doing, but that’s a talk for another time).

---

What’s your experience been like with the PlayStation Store? How about the other ones?

Image is a screenshot sourced from the official website. This is the best I could find from official sources too. This supposed “high resolution” image. Kind of fitting, I guess though.