With all the bad news coming out of the AAA sector of games, I thought it’d be nice to talk about something positive for the change. As I’m sure you’ve noticed, no matter what store you’re on, be it Steam, Xbox, Nintendo’s eShop or the PS Store, you can’t just casually browse what’s available. Well, I mean, you can *try* but that usually means through having to wade through what feels like an ever-deepening ocean of asset flips, knock-offs and AI slop games. It’s absolutely ridiculous, and now Sony seems to finally be taking it seriously and has already done some cleanup.

As reported by Eurogamer, Sony has just finished up its second big cleanup of junkware from the PS Store. Now, don’t go rushing to see if all the slop is truly gone. It’s not, unfortunately. There’s still a lot that needs to get zapped off the platform, but it’s a start. In particular, it seems Sony is going after major offenders. That is, they’re targeting publishers (if you can call them that), developers and individuals with multiple low-effort flips or coincidenttally-named AI fakes under their label. Eurogamer also noted that this follows the delisting of over a thousand such games in January and that the lawsuit that Poppy Playtime developer Mob Entertainment is executing against Google might form part of Sony’s newfound motivation.

It’s a little disappointing to think that the only reason this is happening is that Sony wants to head off potential lawasuits, but, hey, I’ll take it. You gotta take your wins wherever you can find them when it comes to AAA gaming these days. It really sucks having to stick to curated lists and direct searches when trying to find or check out new games on these online storefronts, so anything that makes finding stuff that’s actually good easier is a big win to me. Here’s hoping that the rest of the online stores follow suit. If you ask me, they all could stand to review their approval processes.

I will say, though, is that I have gotten a good laugh or two out of the stuff I’ve found on these stores. Like, how does something like “Ebola Village” make it to the front page of the PS Store? Heck, even the stuff that’s very buried makes me scratch my head. Like, there’s a whole series of games on there that look like something straight out of the home video era from the dawn of YouTube. Seriously, they’re just movies with “choices” scattered about every so often. It’s crazy! Look up “I’m in Love With Your Dead Grandmother” if you want to see them for yourself.

Anyway, a rare W for Sony here. Here’s hoping they wise up and start giving us more reasons to give them props, yeah?

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Have you found any crazy stuff on Steam or PS Store while trying to browse for games? What do you think they’ll have to do to finally stem the tide?

Image is PlayStation promotional content