okay so to start with a disclaimer: screenshots on this page are taken of my TV with a camera, sony seemingly does not allow you to share screenshots of the PSN store in app, i don't know why but i couldn't transfer them and this was the best method i had, apologies in advance

some time ago i had done a piece about what was starting to become an issue on PSN of a single developer pumping out AI game after AI game after AI game, each more derivitive, basic, scammy and trend chasing than the last, at the time i had hoped that something would be done before it got too bad, that this would be a one off and that this storefront would do some curation for once. i was wrong, god wow was i wrong, not only has none of this been solved, at all the same players are still there and thriving even more now with advances in tech, it's gotten significantly worse. before it was a game or two here and there on the store front page and then when you went digging you would see *much* more, i found 25 of these games at the time, which in retrospect was a low number compare to now. at this point it's hundreds of the damn things and they are pushed *hard* on the store, last night the majority of the "games to wishlist" sub bar was AI games, in fact it was *every* game featured bar a lone frogun sequel in amongst the slop (shoutout frogun it owns) and when i hit to expand this section it got even worse, most of this very long section of games was AI slop, weather some are genuine games just using ai or were outright scams and shovelware? i don't know and if i'm being honest to me both are the same, if you decide to use AI in your game at all it displays a lack of care for art, for your customers and for creativity and it devalues your game to the point of near worthlessness, there is too much good art in this world for me to waste time on this stuff. it was so bad that you would see multiple games in a row that would be knocking off the same game with the same font and the same gameplay, it's getting that bad.

now this isn't to say PSN never had a shovelware problem, it always had, tons of easy trophy games and by the numbers knockoffs as early as the end of the ps4 gen but AI has made it so much easier to put this crap out and its gotten to the point where finding really good games to play is getting downright difficult and searching game sales for what you want is such a fools errend that any time i have to to look for DLC it makes me feel happy to be physical only because navigating this any time i wanted to find a new game to buy would give me an actual headache and seeing this stuff get worse day by day would probably just make me depressed. it isn't delegated just to the upcoming games either, the sale sections are overflowing with this garbage too to the point where i have to filter things to just dlc on sale to even be able to make sense of the page because otherwise you're wading through a trove of aigen garbage trying to find prey: mooncrash or whatever and that harms discoverability something fierce, to steam or eshop levels and it's already unsustainable this early on, can you imagine how bad this will be if its left unchecked after a year? indies don't stand a chance of being seen unless by the whims of store showcases and influencers and honestly that's scary.

so who are the perpetrators here, who is responcible. last time our main offender was midnight works SRL and some of its subsidiaries, a shady company that was pumpping out dozens and dozens of these, but now we have tons more. some other more reputable publishers like eastasia soft have been doing it with games like "how to play shoot em up" and "bouncy chicken" both of which use AI art have the use of AI backgrounds and sprites in the games themselves, which is strange because otherwise they're a solid publisher with some pretty cool chinese rpgs and VN releases under their belt. you have your smaller studios like ERDEM SEN which is probably just some guy and NOSTRA GAMES whos main thing seems to be mobile scam games with knock-off names like hearthfire and planetdivers and ai art thrown in to the mix, unknowns that have made nothing before this and you have a *ton* of SRL companies like CHETRUSCA SOFTWORKS SRL, DEZVOLT APP & IDEI SRL and SRL randomspin-games. there's others too like playway inc, 404 games and GOGAME who were mentioned in my last article, DEZVOLT was also mentioned there. interestingly, midnight works has seemingly mostly vanished at least from the upcoming games section with only a few games here instead of the dozzens before, probably to help cover their tracks because of how blatant a front the company was and how many people were pointing out what they were doing.

for the games themselves, i mean take your pick. you have supermarket simulators with horrifying art and unreal store assets that may or may not be stolen right next to each other, like litterally right next to each other. you have vampire survivors clones like the downright disgusting "dracula vs monsters" which has an ai generated video trailer and stolen plants vs zombies sprites. you have elemental cube, a game with ai voices, confusing ai art and a name of the studio that i'm convinced is also generated by ai! i mean can "karuni games oyun YAZLILIM VE pazarlama ticaret limited sirketi" really be a genuine studio name? you have the maybe kind of sort of racist "border police contraband simulator 2024" which again, uses ai art and stolen assets but now its, maybe a little racist. many of them clearly used prompts like pixar for their art and have zero images of the actual games which is a red flag so big i genuinely don't know how any storefront in 2024 allows it at all, both things which should 100% have gave red flags to anyone at sony okaying this, but it seems none of it ever did because sony doesn't seem to care at all, they know that these sales will give them money and having a big number of games on the store looks great to shareholders on a spreadsheet and it's not like people are even making a big stink about it, you'll have people like me writing about it and a small number of youtubers making videos on it but on the whole there's been very few complaints and uproar, either because the majority of your casual game players won't even notice or because the gamers are too busy getting mad about a woman's appearance in a AAA game or about a gay person existing, we're heading towards a garbage nexus and nothing is going to be done about it.

many may be asking why i even care, some of these games might even be good and i just don't know because i'm not giving them the time of day, this might even be true but when you look at these and see the absolute slop they project with their screenshots and art, can you blame me? pro ai tools will tell you all of this is good because it's democritising development, completely ignoring how most of these games are either A: scams or B: creatively bankrupt trend chasers hoping to make a quick buck off of mostly children. i do not and will never agree with these people or these programs, generative ai is cheap, immoral and anti art to me and that will never change, it cheapens an experiance and devolves it from art to product, something to make money and nothing more, even bad art, art that i hate, has value but these do not, they're a mockery of the medium and the people who engage with it and i'd go as far as to say they're a scam with no reason to exist beyond lining the pockets of grifters.