By Nelson Schneider - 01/17/26 at 03:04 PM CT
This week, eagle-eyed industry watchers noticed that something was going on deep in the bowels of the PlayStation Network. ThiGamesDE – a Germany-based developer of Trophy-Farming shovelware games, who had the 4th most games available for purchase on PSN – just had all of its games de-listed from the PlayStation Store, rendering them unpurchasable. That comes to a sum total of OVER 1000 titles that have just vanished into the void!
On one hand, this is good news for the concept of Game Curation, which has been a major sticking point since the advent of digital distribution removed the financial blockers that typically allowed only games with a publisher and a moderate amount of effort behind them to find themselves generally available for purchase in the broader market. Ever since the rise of smartphones in 2007, and their accompanying App Store ecosystems, the low barrier to entry has seen exploitation by scammers and low-effort coders throwing all of their sh!t at the proverbial wall to see what sticks. The result has been both the explosion of Indie games suddenly competing head-to-head with publisher-backed titles – and often WINNING! – as well as the severe overpopulation of every digital storefront with more games releasing in a single year than Golden Age consoles got in their entire lifespans.
At MeltedJoystick, we’ve all been hoping for quite some time that Valve would do something about the lack of curation on Steam, and at first glance, it seems that Sony might be showing them the way forward – simply identify a purveyor of trash, then quickly and quietly de-platform them. Then move onto the next one.
However, Sony’s reasons for de-listing ThiGamesDE’s entire library of garbage are somewhat dubious. It seems that Sony, along with both Nintendo and Microsoft, recently signed a joint agreement related to “online safety.” Anyone who has been paying attention to the horrific political developments in Europe and the UK over the last couple years will shudder upon reading those two words, as “online safety” has lead to the explosion of privacy invading tracking technologies, AI-powered facial recognition programs required to register for any site that might feature NSFW content of any kind, and the push for digital IDs tied to real-world IDs, destroying the anonymity that has always been the foundation of the Internet and modern communications technology.
So maybe it’s NOT actually a good thing that Sony has decided to protect us from a single trash-peddling shovelware developer. Who knows what they’ll arbitrarily decide we need to be protected from next?
