Sony is aggressively wiping out leech games to keep the PlayStation catalog tidy

Sony is deleting the PlayStation Store's worst games faster than ever, but that can’t solve the Shovelware problem alone.

By Shikhar Mehrotra Published April 7, 2026

Ahmad Mohammadnejad / Unsplash

If you’ve ever scrolled through the PlayStation Store and stumbled across some games with an oddly familiar title, characters, or graphics, but only with cheap reskins and almost no originality, Sony has finally heard you.

The company has quietly wiped the entire catalogs of three publishers from the PlayStation Store: GoGame Console Publisher, VRCForge Studios, and Welding Byte. The removals were first potted on PSNProfiles, including popular titles such as Urban Driver Simulator, Water Blast Shooter – Wet Gun, and Supermarket CEO Simulator (via EuroGamer).

What Is Shovelware anyway?

Shovelware is an umbrella term for games produced with minimal effort, cloning trending titles to ride their popularity, and those designed to hand players easy achievement or Trophy unlocks. Think of them as the cheap copies of popular titles that somehow made their way to the PlayStation Store by exploiting its relatively open submission process.

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Anyway, to clean up its digital storefront and provide PlayStation owners with a refined experience, the latest update should help. What’s even more interesting is the fact that Sony is already doing this for the third time in 2026.

The fourth-largest publisher on the PlayStation Store (by volume), with over a thousand titles, was entirely removed in January 2026, followed by CHI Laba and Nostra Games in March. The April removal comes less than two weeks after the March sweep.

Is Sony’s crackdown actually working?

Partially. These removals are said to be connected to the Shared Commitment to Safer Gaming, a collaborative initiative between three console or publishing giants: Sony, Xbox, and Nintendo. The institutional backing gives Sony’s latest crackdown more weight than the previous, isolated purges.

However, on the ground, in the PlayStation Store, the problem persists. Sony’s approach remains reactive, implying that the company removes flagged content rather than reviewing it in the first place and preventing low-effort titles from appearing in the store. Further, the banned content keeps reappearing on the platform under different names.

Until submission standards tighten, it could be challenging for Sony to keep things under control. In my opinion, Sony should move from reactive delisting to proactive submission gatekeeping, or else the cycle will continue. But even so, the latest crackdown is worth commending.

Shikhar Mehrotra

News Writer

For more than five years, Shikhar has consistently simplified developments in the field of consumer tech and presented them…

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