There is a purge going on.
Sony has severed its relationship with Brazilian publisher Afil Games as part of a tightening of its PlayStation publishing standards, in what looks like an escalation of the company's long-running war on so-called shovelware. Afil revealed the split itself in a social media statement, saying that because PlayStation has been "implementing stricter guidelines for publishing games on its platform," and because those rules clash with how Afil operates, Sony "decided not to continue its partnership with Afil Games for future releases." The publisher's existing titles remain purchasable on the US PlayStation Store for now, but they're set to be pulled in the near future, taking a sizeable catalogue down with them.
A Strategic Shift From Cleanup to Gatekeeping
The part of the issue isn't the removal itself but the mechanism behind it, which marks a genuine change in approach. For a long time, Sony only acted against the most notorious shovelware publishers after sustained player complaints, deleting games after they'd already flooded the store, and many of the banned outfits simply reappeared under new names to start the cycle again. The new "stricter guidelines" flip that reactive model on its head. Rather than picking off offenders one outcry at a time, Sony is now reportedly enforcing publishing rules at the gate, with Afil noting its high-volume "business model" is no longer compatible with the platform, and reports suggesting dozens of developers have lost their contracts in the process. Shutting the door on the publishing side, rather than just deleting finished games, is how Sony stops the whack-a-mole problem that plagued its earlier efforts.
The Scale of the Purge
Afil's catalogue alone reportedly runs to close to 1,000 titles, an enormous output that captures exactly why these publishers draw scrutiny, since the model depends on churning out simple games at volume rather than investing in any single one. And Afil is just the latest target. Sony has reportedly removed something approaching 4,000 low-effort games from the PlayStation Store across 2026, working in waves of roughly 1,000 at a time in January, April, and June, with the January purge having gutted publisher ThiGames among others. Before that wipe, ThiGames trailed only Eastasiasoft, Ratalaika Games, and Webnetic for the most titles listed on the PS4 and PS5 stores, which gives a sense of just how thoroughly these publishers had come to dominate the storefront by sheer quantity.
The Trophy Wrinkle and the Pivot Elsewhere
There's a reason this content exists at all, and it complicates the "everyone hates shovelware" narrative slightly. While most players treat these games as clutter that buries genuinely interesting titles, a specific subset actively seeks them out, since many are deliberately engineered to hand players an easy Platinum trophy in minutes, making them attractive to trophy hunters looking to inflate their collections cheaply. That niche demand is part of what kept the model profitable for so long. Cut off from PlayStation, Afil has made clear it isn't going away, reaffirming its commitment to keep releasing on Xbox One, Xbox Series, the Microsoft Store, and Nintendo Switch, and teasing several projects in development. That pivot highlights the limits of any single platform's cleanup, since tightening the rules on one storefront tends to redirect this kind of catalogue-heavy publishing toward whichever platforms remain open rather than ending it outright. For Sony PlayStation players, though, the practical upshot is a store that should slowly become easier to navigate, as Sony shifts from mopping up shovelware after the fact to simply not letting it through the door.
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