PlayStation Store Adds A ‘Skip Trash Games’ Button, Somehow Still Misses Half The Crap
Look, I’m not saying the PlayStation Store is a digital landfill, but I am saying I’ve seen cleaner code in a Windows 95 error message. For years, we’ve begged Sony to do something, *anything* about the absolute tsunami of asset-flipped, AI-generated, “my-first-Unity-project” garbage that clogs up every sale page like a clogged toilet at a Taco Bell. And now, in a move that is equal parts hilarious and infuriating, Sony has finally responded. They added a “Skip Trash Games” button.
Yes, you read that right. The multi-billion dollar corporation, the same people who brought you the DualSense Edge’s “we fixed the battery life by making it smaller” design philosophy, has decided that the solution to their store being a digital cesspool is to give *us* a button that says “please don’t show me the digital equivalent of a used tissue.” It’s like your landlord fixing a hole in the wall by handing you a “Skip Looking At The Wall” button. The audacity.
Let’s be real for a second. The PlayStation Store has been on a steady decline since the PS4 era. It started off as a clean, curated experience. Then the indie boom happened, which was great! We got Hades, Hollow Knight, Celeste. But then the gold rush hit. Every single person with a copy of RPG Maker and a dream of making a quick buck flooded the store with “Super Ultra Mega Platformer 4: The Quest for More Money.” And Sony, in their infinite wisdom, just let it happen. They took their 30% cut and said, “Looks good to me! Your game has a title screen? Certified banger.”
So now, instead of, you know, *actually curating* the store, or hiring a single intern to look at the “New Releases” page and say “Hey, maybe this ‘Zombie Shooter 2024 Gold Edition Remastered Deluxe’ isn’t worth the digital shelf space,” they slapped a band-aid on a bullet wound. The “Skip Trash Games” button is a confession. It’s Sony admitting, “Yeah, we know 85% of our store is digital garbage, but we already cashed their checks, so you deal with it.”
The actual implementation is, predictably, a joke. You can find the button buried three menus deep under “Settings,” “Accessibility,” “Store Experience,” “Maybe If You Close Your Eyes,” “Skip Trash Games.” It’s less of a button and more of a sarcastic nod from a dev team that hates their job. And does it work? Sort of. The first time I clicked it, my store screen went black for two seconds, then refreshed. It hid maybe… 50% of the asset flips. It still showed me “Survival Crafting Simulator 7” and “Puzzle Quest: Match 3 Gold Edition.” It hid the literal shovelware but left the slightly-fancier shovelware. It’s like a bouncer at a club who only kicks out the people who are visibly bleeding, but lets in everyone who is just heavily intoxicated.
The Reddit reaction has been, as you’d expect, a beautiful dumpster fire. The r/PS5 subreddit is currently a war zone between the “Why are you complaining? It’s a free update!” crowd and the “This is a slap in the face to actual indie devs” crowd. Top comment right now is from user u/DefinitelyNotABot_69: “Sony: ‘We heard you wanted better curation. Here’s a button that does the same as scrolling past the first 4 rows of new releases.’” Another gem from u/platinum_achievement_hunter: “I clicked the button and it just opened the store page for ‘The Last of Us Part I’ again. Is that the trash or the game?”
And honestly, they’re not wrong. This is peak Sony. They have the resources. They have the algorithms. They could easily implement a system that flags games with less than 100 reviews, or games that use stolen art assets, or games that have “Zombie” in the title and were released in the last 3 months. But no. That would require effort. That would require them to admit that their “quality over quantity” approach to exclusives does not extend to their digital storefront. It’s the same energy as the PS5’s “Mute” button on the controller being a single-use, no-hold button that you can accidentally hit. It’s the same energy as the PS5’s UI being slower than a PS4’s.
The worst part? The “Skip Trash Games” button is a feature that will inevitably break. Give it two months. A system update will come out, and the button will either stop working entirely, or it will start hiding every game on the store, including first-party titles. Then you’ll have to navigate a labyrinth of menus to turn it off, only to find that Sony has moved the setting to a new menu called “Legacy Features (Do Not Touch).”
And what about the indie devs who are actually trying? The guys who spent three years making a beautiful, unique game with a budget of three pizzas and a dream? They’re now competing for visibility against the “Skip Trash Games” button itself. Their game might be good, but the algorithm now has a binary switch that says “Trash.” If your game has a low review count, or a weird title, or pixel art, congratulations, you’re now in the same digital pile as “Doge Miner 2: NFT Edition.” The button is a sledgehammer when they needed a scalpel. It’s a digital shotgun blast to separate the wheat from the chaff, except it also just shoots the wheat out of spite.
So, congratulations, Sony. You’ve managed to make your store slightly less painful to browse, but only by admitting that you’ve been charging us full price to shop in
Final Thoughts
Having covered the industry long enough to see storefronts come and go, the PlayStation Store’s latest evolution feels less like a celebration of curation and more like a corporate compliance checklist—designed to maximize engagement rather than discovery. While the interface is undeniably sleeker, the algorithmic push of live-service behemoths and premium-priced re-releases signals a store that has forgotten the delicate art of surfacing hidden gems. In the end, Sony’s digital marketplace remains a ruthless, efficient machine, but it has lost the soul of the record shop for the sterile efficiency of a vending machine.