The PlayStation Store has a shovelware problem, and Sony keeps chipping away at it. This week, another batch of low-effort titles got the boot, with the entire catalogues of GoGame Console Publisher, VRCForge Studios, and Welding Byte removed from Sony's digital storefronts. The delistings were quietly tracked by community databases that monitor PlayStation Store removals.
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The titles that got pulled
The specific games caught in this sweep include GoGame Console Publisher'sUrban Driver Simulator (PS5 stack), and several VRCForge Studios titles: Water Blast Shooter - Wet Gun, Racing Car Chaos: Extreme Stunt Showdown, Supermarket CEO Simulator (PS5 stack), and the eyebrow-raising Jesus Simulator. These are exactly the kind of titles that give digital storefronts a bad reputation: names that sound vaguely familiar, asset flips with minimal effort behind them, or AI-generated slop dressed up as a product.
Here's the thing with shovelware like this. Publishers often name their games to echo successful indie titles, banking on search confusion to drive accidental purchases. It's a cynical tactic, and the fact that Sony keeps finding more of it suggests the problem runs deeper than any single sweep can fix.
A pattern that goes back months
This is not a one-off. Back in January, Sony wiped over 1,000 games from a single developer off the PlayStation Store without warning, which was one of the largest single-publisher purges anyone had documented. That move signaled Sony was done tolerating bulk-uploaded garbage clogging its storefront.
The shovelware issue is not exclusive to Sony either. Mob Entertainment, the studio behind Poppy Playtime, filed legal papers in January 2025 targeting Daigo Game 2020 Inc. for flooding the Google Play Store with fake apps using names like Poppy Playtime: Chapter 3 and Poppy Playtime: Chapter 4 before those chapters had even launched on mobile. The tactic is the same across platforms: ride a popular name, collect some purchases, disappear before anyone notices.
Publisher catalogues on PS Store
Why this keeps happening
The key here is that platform holders have historically made it relatively easy to publish on digital storefronts, which opened the door to legitimate indie developers but also to bad actors pumping out content at volume. Sony's submission process for the PS Store has always had a lower barrier than, say, a retail release, and shovelware publishers have exploited that gap for years.
What most players miss is that these delistings, while satisfying, are reactive. Sony removes what gets flagged, but the publishers behind these games can and do reappear under different names. VRCForge Studios and Welding Byte are not household names, and there is nothing stopping similar operations from spinning up new accounts and starting the cycle again.
For a deeper look at how platform curation affects the games you actually play, browse the latest gaming news on our site for more coverage on how Sony and other platform holders are handling store quality. The cleanup continues, but the pace of the problem has not slowed down yet.
