Sony appears to have started tightening its PlayStation Store publishing rules this year. That’s according to publisher Afil Games, which says several of its titles have been removed from the storefront. The focus seems to be “shovelware” on the PlayStation Store: low-effort games with little or no real value, the kind of releases that look built mainly to squeeze money out of players. If Afil Games is right, Sony now wants to come down on that much harder.
A change Sony hasn’t announced publicly
This doesn’t mean hundreds or thousands of games vanished overnight. But Afil Games, a publisher known for smaller releases, says several of its titles are gone from the PlayStation Store. In a post on X, Afil Games wrote: “As many of you may already know, since the beginning of this year PlayStation has been implementing stricter rules for publishing games on its platform,” before adding that “because of these new rules, and because they do not fit our business model, PlayStation has decided not to continue its collaboration with Afil Games for future releases on the console.”
At a glance, Afil Games’ titles don’t look especially harmful. They’re simple, short, and mostly aimed at players chasing quick trophies. But Afil Games says so many of its releases are nearly identical, and ask so little from the player, that Sony has decided not to allow future Afil Games releases on the platform. So yes, that would amount to stricter rules around what gets published on the PlayStation Store.
Sony hasn’t confirmed any of this so far. Still, it would make sense if the platform starts seeing fewer low-quality releases from here on out. The same problem exists on other storefronts too, especially the Nintendo eShop and Steam, both of which have been struggling with shovelware for a long time. It’s one of the biggest problems digital game stores are dealing with right now.
