Sony Removes 1,000 AI Shovelware Games from PS Store

Sony has quietly wiped two more publishers from the PlayStation Store, removing over 1,000 game listings from Nostra Games and CGI Lab in what is becoming a pattern rather than an exception. As tracked by Delisted Games, Nostra Games, a Cyprus-based studio, had built up close to 90 titles on the platform, which ballooned to around 700 separate listings once regional versions were counted. All of them are gone.

Nostra isn't exactly unknown in these circles. The studio made headlines recently when its cat co-op game Ghostly Whiskers was accused of being an AI-generated knock-off of Haunted Paws, and its broader catalogue leaned heavily on simulation titles churned out with regularity. A spokesperson for the studio posted a statement on its official Discord that was, to put it charitably, unbothered: "Unfortunately, PlayStation Store has removed our games, and we're unable to provide an exact reason because it wasn't shared with us either. For now we are planning to continue releasing on Nintendo Switch, Xbox, and Steam. This was just as unexpected for us as it was for you."

So they'll just take the operation elsewhere. Good to know.

CGI Lab was caught in the same sweep, though its catalogue was considerably smaller. Its output included titles like Platform Zero and Veins of Darkness, both sitting firmly in the low-effort horror category. Unlike Nostra, CGI Lab has said nothing publicly about the removals.

This Is the Second Major Purge in Two Months

Back in January, Sony removed nearly 1,200 games from ThiGames, the publisher responsible for an almost incomprehensible volume of titles like The Jumping Pizza. Before that, Midnight Works received the same treatment. The timeline here is important: Sony isn't running a continuous quality filter, it's doing periodic sweeps. Publishers can apparently flood the store for months or years before anyone pulls the plug.

That's the real problem. Nostra had time to accumulate 700 listings. ThiGames hit 1,200. These numbers don't happen overnight, and they don't go unnoticed by the people buying and reviewing these games on the platform. The easy Platinum trophies that came stacked across regional versions were an open secret in trophy-hunting communities for a long time before Sony acted. Credit where it's due for cleaning house, but the house shouldn't have gotten this messy in the first place.

The AI angle makes it worse. A meaningful portion of these games used generative AI assets, which keeps production costs near zero and makes volume publishing trivially easy. Sony isn't the only platform dealing with this; Steam reported that roughly 20% of games released on it in 2025 used AI in some form, with 40% of those earning less than $100. The economics of shovelware have never been more attractive to bad-faith publishers, which means platform holders are going to need something more systematic than a quarterly purge.

Blocking these games at submission rather than delisting them months later is the obvious answer, and it's genuinely baffling that Sony doesn't appear to have a reliable mechanism for doing that. Microsoft, Nintendo, and Valve are all going to inherit Nostra's future output now, and none of them have shown they're any better equipped to handle it. The PS Store is cleaner today than it was last week. That's not nothing. But until Sony builds a filter that works at the front door instead of the back, the next purge is already loading.

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