Playstation has sent out a dev letter to all its developers noting that shovelware, games that are reskinned, non-games, and games just made to give people a platinum trophy are going to be either shadowbanned or delisted with a chance that the developers being banned from publishing any more games.
An anonymous source has sent us the following information that was included in the dev letter. In the letter, Sony Playstation states:
“SIE strives to ensure that customers can search and discover the full breadth of experiences on PlayStation, and that partners have a fair means of being discovered. When partners oversaturate or “spam” PlayStation™Store with many variants of the same type of content, it can negatively impact both the customer and partner experience.
Partner Requirements & Allowances
When SIE reviews the content submitted to PlayStation™Store, products that have the following characteristics are identified as “spam” or “repetitive” content:
Products whose functionality and/or assets are copied or are not meaningfully different from products already published on PlayStation™Store, irrespective of the publisher of record.
Multiple concepts and product variants, published by individual partners, that have duplicative functionality or experiences, differentiated only by minor variances of functionality or assets.
o Where possible, partners should consider aggregating small, similar content experiences into a single product, using in-game commerce to expand or extend the experience.
o As an example, supplying different trophies for each product is not enough to differentiate content.”
If any of the devs break these things mentioned above, Sony Playstation has said the following in that letter about the actions in place:
Content or partners found to have breached policy may be subject to the following enforcement actions:
- Content Excluded from PlayStation™Store Merchandising
- Discoverability on PlayStation™Store is restricted.
- Content does not feature in automatic merchandising placements, such as the “New Releases” strand.
- Content Delisted from PlayStation™Store
- Content is not searchable and can only be accessed via direct link on web and mobile stores.
- Impact on CertOps Process
- Content is not permitted to proceed to publication until policy violations are rectified.
- Review slot availability is affected.
- Content Takedown
- Content is removed from PlayStation™Store until policy violations are rectified.
- PlayStation®Partners Account Suspension or Termination
- Multiple rejections or takedowns may result in the suspension or eventual termination of a partner’s PlayStation Partners account.
- Suspension limits the ability to submit and publish new content. Existing published content can remain on PlayStation™Store, if that content complies with SIE policies.
- Termination of an account results in the removal of all content from PlayStation™Store.
What do you think of this ban? Did you play any of the shovelware games or are you happy to see these games being removed? Please let us know on Twitter or in the comments below (Account required)! Want to know our view on it? then check out this article on why the trophy system is broken.
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