There was something oddly enjoyable about finding a game where the team behind it said "yeah we are making shovel ware but that doesnt mean i have to make BAD shovel ware" and then proceed to make a well made, funny, if slightly ugly game. When someone really loved their job as a developer, and you could tell, despite the ovbious shovelware.
The switch is overrun with a lot of ai slop, and it’s worse because most is targeted towards children or younger people with a “story” or “learning” not to mention outside of this is ai “h*ntai” games in the 18+ category
The worst part of the eShop is that they don't even hide the NSFW/inappropriate games for accounts under 18, or give you a choice for "Do not show me this". Steam has had it since the start and it has worked flawlessly
There not showing anything NSFW in the thumbnails or screen shots though its nothing worse than you see on a magazine or manga cover in a shop. They should have the tag feature to hide things though.
Steam only in the last few weeks or so made it so you could hide your adult game activity from the public eye (on individual games) without having to hide ALL your game activity. lol
Steam allows refunds trivially if you don't waste too many hours on the game, and the review system gives useful red flags, so while there are a LOT of bad games on Steam, they're a lot less likely to make money.
iirc nintendo eshop doesnt allow any type of refunds? and also, I think it's pretty important, there's like no reviews or ratings there 🌚 i really don't like it
@@angelichourstonight Agreed, Nintendo eshop doesn't allow refunds or reviews. However, I was specifically talking about Steam. Nintendo eshop has recently become something of a dumpster fire of shovelware. PSN too, to some extent.
Don't forget piracy exists and you can use it to try a game if there's no demo or anything before "purchasing" something. You straight up skip the hassle of maybe getting a refund or not.
@ZackLillipad, what about AOH3 it has ai in it, but it's not shovelware. If you wanna know why I said that it's because I've played it and it's a fun game.
As if there wasn't already tons of cheap shovelware trash before, especially on mobile, mh? AI is just a tool, don't blame it for something us humans created ourselves.
The fact Nintendo has always been marketed as having family friendly games and then will allow AI porn slop to be on their “New games of the Week!” news page pisses me off they don’t even bother hiding it or having any age restriction whatsoever
@@toidIllorTAmI genuinely so stupid, they took down so many games off of vimm not that long ago, if only they'd put in the same effort to manage their own store instead
Reasons like this are why Steam charges developers ($100 I belive) to actually put the game into the platform and gives the money back when the game creates $1000 of profit, making it harder to spam games edit: changed $100 to $1000
I’ve done my fair research into the ai generated games on the eshop, and the main culprit is Alford games. They’ve been in the market for a while now, and it’s sad seeing the eshop filled with them. (I made a whole video about this if anyone’s interested)
I hate browsing the Nintendo switch eshop so much… Not only is it filled to the brim with the aforementioned shovelware slop, but the app itself is barely even able to run properly. The painfully slow load times, complete silence, barebones UI, and the fact that I can only ever see up to 6 games onscreen while browsing is genuinely miserable
No way to rate or review games. If a game is brokenly buggy, I should be able to know ahead of time. I should be able to warn others of my wasted money. The eShop is a minimum of 90% shovelware bullshit. The rest is grossly overpriced digital downloads. $60 for a download when the game cart costs $40 from Walmart? Fuck that. Then there's the eVoucher scam. $100 for 2 digital downloads... Some games are $60, yes. The elegible games cost as little as **$35**. How the fuck is that not blatantly ripping people off?
@eightcoins4401 There was a star rating system that also allowed you to select certain tags, that helped give players an idea of what kind of game it was like. Far better than the absolutely nothing we have now.
Ai is the new comic sans to me. The moment I saw the cover for that super market game, I immediately scrolled past it. EDIT: Apparently everyone in the replies love comic sans lol. Okay fair, fair! It’s got it’s fans!
I understand Steam having zero quality control but the lack of quality control on the Eshop has always been crazy to me. Nintendo used to rarely have M rated games on their consoles now the eshop is girls gone wild 💀
so you expect the company that made the wii, the unquestionable king of shovelware slop, to have good quality control for the games that go on their consoles but you don’t expect Steam to have it? I really don’t understand the logic behind that
@@libbybibby1579if you go into some game dev spaces, you see talks that it is really hard to actually GET onto the nintendo shops. I thought it was hard too especially when lots of my fav games didnt get ported to switch from console and it wasnt because specs but issues with the eshop itself. It seems like a lot of indie devs or hobby devs dont get their games on there unless its hentai 😂
Don't believe there will be another crash from AI. Casuals will download whatever is on the app store and pick up the yearly edition of COD and sports titles while the younger crowd will stick to Fortnite and Roblox. But like you said the AI slop is only affecting lesser known Indie devs.
I've noticed that a lot of games on the Nintendo eshop are just mobile games that have been ported to pc and/or consoles, this is a trend I've noticed lately & it's rather worrying, it doesn't help that the Switch store is a nightmare to navigate. This is only one of the many reasons why I mainly buy physical and mostly stick to my favourite gaming franchises.
Despite my fujoshi status, I'm still a bit horrified that there's no setting to hide NSFW content. I may like (and purchase) erotic content, but the audience for Nintendo as a brand is catered towards children. Something needs to be done such as hiding NSFW content for under-18 accounts along with adding a general "Hide NSFW" that anyone can use.
A type of shovelware you didn't mention are the trophy/achievement farming games. Games that just artificially boost your score in your profile. And those games are equally low effort that are spreading on Xbox and PlayStation.
Part of the problem is that the EU might brand you as anti-competitive if you do anything about shovelware. During the DS era a French court already ruled against Nintendo for "excluding developers". Nowadays with the Digital Markets Act this would be far more devastating.
@@johnnysaurus04 fitting considering it had the British in it at one point who are the biggest historical example of a country making everyone's lives worse
Just ban LLM use for games in the shops. Same thing many art sites have done with LLM pictures. It’s clear that there is no use for this technology in video games and it’s actively harming the space, so ban it.
Your forgetting Xbox 360 arcade which had devs who kept exploiting the fact Minecraft wasn't released on Xbox yet as well as Mojangs lenient copyright policy to spam the store with Minecraft clone shovelware
Me and my friend group probably sank a good 300+ hours into Castleminer Z back in the day, it wasn't quite Minecraft but we still had a great time. I guess my point is at least the slop was somewhat worth it back then when Minecraft wasn't an option.
I remember when the Wii first released and my best friend got one for his birthday. We were sharing an apartment at the time and used to spend hours and hours bowling, havibg strike competitions etc. Played til sunrise on several occasions when it first came out. His Wii came with WiiSports when he got it. Man, to be young again. I miss you, Markee. RIP brother 🙏 ❤️
I want to see the return of the good movie liscensed games from the 6th and 7th gen. It beats unreal asset flip hentai slop that's overtaking the shops.
I think there's a lot of decent license games. They're kinda broader now to make a more creative game but we got stuff like Hogwarts Legacy alien isolation shadow of Mordor SpongeBob platformers made a return. Good stuff out there
The industry is in a very paradoxic position right now. Major corporations trying their best to push boundaries with how little effort they need to put into making games something thats just graphically competent while trying all kinds of new ways to fuck over their customers. Meanwhile the majority of people playing games right now are either not aware of this at all or simply forget about any controversies as fast as they happen with no real danger to any big game company to go bankrupt because people just cant stop buying their shit no matter what. The only way the industry would crash is to make the companies dissapear and even then people would left angry why they cant keep buying the latest always online microtransaction and battle pass filled slop anymore.
I feel the industry as a whole is trash. Very few games capture my attention these days. Something I feel that is lacking in the industry is competitors to existing game franchises. Ubisoft: How is this company still alive Ea: Life simulation > Sims 4 Microsoft: RTS > Age of Empires, Warcraft, Starcraft, Age of Mythology, Halo Wars Sony: (Press button for the game to play it for you) Nintendo: Mario, Zelda, Pokemon, & bunch of great ips Take Two: Every sports game ever, rockstar, & civilization games Embracer group: Just owns too much Tencent: just owns too much ^ Alot of these companies have either carved out themselves a niche when it comes to a certain genre or the simply bought up the industry. There is lack direct competition when it comes to genres. Everyone is gonna flock to microsoft for RTS, Bethesda, or ABK Everyone is gonna flock to EA for sims or city builders (city skylines exist, but there isn't a lot of competition) Everyone is gonna flock to take 2 for Grand theft auto, civilization, & sports games Everyone is gonna buy the ps5 just to play their spidermans or nintendo's for mario, zelda, & pokemon Where as Embracer group & tencent are just gonna supply mostly filler to the masses.
I feel like heavy regulation on MTS to the point where it's no longer a viable business model wouldn't be impossible to implement. Though that would first require useless governments to actually do something.
100% on the "majority of people don't know how bad the industry is right now" part, the amount of people nowdays that defend rushed games because "stop being entitled and just turn off your brain and enjoy things" is way too much
@@AlexiosTheSixth The complete lack for any frame or reference is what drives many to the conclusion that every game is the best there ever was and we are living in some sort of golden age of video games just because the grpahical fidelity of console games is now noticeably better than it was over a decade ago. All the while ignoring how these games can someday just dissapear forever, are full of nickel and diming features despite costing 70+ dollars with gameplay and content thats not going to want to keep playing for more than couple of walktroughs. Its depressing how these are the majority that are moving the whole industry along with their careless spending habits and impulsive purchases.
I think that all store fronts should have a public review system so that people can be informed as to what they are buying. They all should also have a return system.
Xbox reviews are public idk why PlayStation and Nintendo aren’t but even then some companies use “fake reviews” like if you go. To mortal kombat 1 or forza on the Xbox store they both have a good 4.5-5 star rating but when you actually see the reviews they are all 2 & 1 star reviews being bombed. a couple of Ubisoft games lol.
@@b4rs629 actually technically take two owns both Rockstar and 2k😅😅 it’s also why I believe they have the new mafia game by 2k take place in the old country then the rumored 70s-80s Las Vegas one I been heading about over the years cause they don’t want to compete with GTA 6 a similar open world game from Rockstar.
@@darklord9581 All good. That's interesting point you brought up mafia and gta 6... about not competing with themselves. I didn't think of it at all lol. Now that I think about it. That's honestly how it feels with Nintendo & pokemon mainline & spinoffs games.
Just like Scott The Woz said, if the platform has alot of casual consumers their always Shovelware. It mostly the market allowed it to exist, even companies try to filter it if people who was low standard still exist, shovelware will never go away.
This is why I don't people seriously when they say they play on mobile. For every 1 good game on mobile... there is 1000's of trash games. Even the best games on mobile are pay to win garbage.
My biggest gripe with ai shovelware slop is NSFW games You used to be able to find hidden gems, and most games were of decent quality. Now, for every fate/stay, there is 600 ai slop with the exact same gameplay
As i always told everyone: most people are coprophags and animefans - are coprophags among coprophags(asian culture cannot affect westernwired brain in any good way, mark my words)
@GUNUFofficial with "super" shovelware I meant that Roblox is practically a platform for random people to make shovelware in and using the Roblox game itself. You know, the thousands of usermade barely games. Thus, the Roblox itself is a "super" as in "on top of."
@@davidsentanu7836 when you say it like that yeah I get it, it's gone from kids making "escape jeff the killer obby!" To greedy companies and people making mobile tier lootbox garbage. Although that kid aspect is still there, play groovydominoes games they're really good.
roblox went from having slightly quality games to being completely shovelware, i cant even open the app anymore without being bombarded by AI, oversaturated colors, and general slop made by child predators (cough cough Dandys World)
The state of the Eshop is depressing, Nintendo has lost control of it for a long time and the lack of an algorithm, an AI only makes matters worse. The only tab you'll want to look at is "Great Deals", because that's where people are buying, and people usually (not always) buy decent to good quality stuff. I think they're waiting to fix the Eshop on the next console, reforming it 100%, because even the slowness of the Eshop on the Switch is abnormal, especially compared to the system which is super smooth.
Here are my thoughts (cuz I am so qualified and everyone wants to hear) I don't think Nintendo ever predicted the switch to grow this large. It was never meant to stand up with Wii, PS2 and DS as such a huge platform. Thus, they didn't invest early on in a fully functioning search algorithm. They wouldn't have the capital or knowledge to design one, as they are not a tech company. This, they can't keep up with the unexpected influx. Not a perfect explanation, they could hire another company to manage it. Though I don't know their thoughts on that. This does seem to happen a lot with them however, as they don't have knowledge Sony and Microsoft do to run servers, or design software beyond games. Tldr, Nintendo is ill equipped to deal with a problem like this.
@@777idkineedausername explain how they aren't a tech company. I get if your saying that Microsoft has more knowledge with these kinds of algorithms, but Sony I guess does have more variety than Nintendo in terms of products, but other than gaming, they are pretty much just a hardware company. Making speakers and TV's is not going to be helpful experience for making a complex searching algorithm like making the most popular PC operating system would.
So there’s a whole other thing going on with those “hen tie girls” games. They don’t actually have anything explicit in them, they just are featuring characters who were originally used in comics that do.
nsfw games are a given, nothing really wrong with them, but the fact nintendo is just allowing them next to kids' and family games without any sort of restriction HAS to be illegal somehow
This video needs more views, this is such an issue on ps5. It went from me wanting that tcg shop game everyone is playing on pc, to seeing 7 rip offs on the psn store. I almost bought one but thankfully i waited and saw how the game ended up with 1 star from over 300 people
I was looking for an unrelated games and came across this same issue for Lethal Company, there are two separate just related games called Lethal Corpo and Lethal Corporation, every popular game now just gets flooded with copies
Exactly. I feel like there’s a distinction to be made between straight-up shovelware and decently competent budget titles. Yeah, Canada Hunt and CID the Dummy exist, but titles like Carnival Games and Go Vacation seemed to have actually put forth the effort to make their gameplay engaging.
@@sirsoftspokenGo Vacation was made by Bandai Namco and is an actual unofficial sequel to Wii Sports Resort with a lot of improvements from that game like being able to fully explore the island on foot via an interconnected overworld. It's very high quality and is FAR from being shovelware even if it is a mini game collection on Wii with ripoff Miis. Calling Go Vacation (or it's prequel Wii Ski for that matter) shovelware is blasphemy. Those games are NOTHING like the actual shovelware Wii sports knockoffs like Deca Sports and Game Party.
@@KrimsonKattYT As someone whose comfort game is Go Vacation, i wasn’t referring to it as shovelware, but as a competent budget title. It’s certainly not big budget like some of BN’s other offerings, like Tekken or one of the Tales games, but there’s a fair bit of love and effort put into making the game worthwhile. Shovelware it is not.
the shock i felt when you mentioned carnival games was UNMATCHED. i have so many memories with carnival games (particularly how scary the main dude was to me) and i didn’t know anyone else knew it existed
i have both the wii and switch version cus my dad bought them my wii hasn't worked in 8 years so i don't remember that one, which is probably a good thing i did play the switch version a week ago though. it sucks
@@ZackLillipad This video was great my dude. I liked that you pointed out a lot of shovelware is mainly online these days & not in physical stores which is awesome because we can just go in and see if they have or not. I completely agree with the vid. I never accumulated a large amount of shovelware on the wii or any console in general because I was always playing catchup. + I also never had a large collection of games either. I was in my early teens when the wii came out so I was more aware / concious + Alot of the games didn't appeal to me for the wii & same for the wii u. As I was getting into pc gaming for the first time in like 07 with World of Warcraft & other blizzard games that came after. I had a few games that could be considered shovelware, but they were still fun to play. Canival Games Harry Potter & the Order of the Phoenix (Easily the best harry potter game for the wii) Harry Potter & the half-blood prince (decent, but I noticed the dip in quality compared to order of the phoenix) Sims 3 (horrible game design) The rest of my wii games were Guitar hero 3 Need for speeds: prostreet Driver parallel lines Mario Party 8 Sims 2 castaway (Outside of nintendo 1st party titles especially for wii, wii u, ds, & 3ds... alot of games were straight up trash) Even with the gamecube had some shovelware, but even then the quality was a lot better compared to the wii & after. My gamecube collection was mostly the heavy hitters, a few filler games, but no shovelware. (This was the first console I had where I had more than 10 games & they were all great games as well) My n64 I had like 5 games, but they were all pretty fun games. Super Mario 64, Pokemon Stadium, Jetforce Gemini, Star wars pod racer ep 1, & WCW vs Nwo Revenge
I don't think E.T. for the Atari 2600 actually counts as shovelware because it was a heavily-promoted first -party title from Atari. I feel like true shovelware is third party low-budget/low-effort slop which doesn't get much advertising. I think the most shovelware you got on any gaming-capable device in that general era on gaming was actually on the Commodore 64, where the bulk of games were sold on the exact same type of cassettes used for music so the cost of entry for being a single-person game publisher on the C-64 was simply having a dual tape deck for dubbing tapes, buying a stack of audiotapes, and maybe spending a couple of hundred dollars/pounds to advertise your latest mail order game in the small print classified ads in the back of gaming magazines of the day.
ET is like it is because it had half the dev time other games had at the time and the dev had made good games before so you can blame atari on it begin a mess.
@@Acidonia150reborn ET is probably also not the worst game on the Atari 2600, it was just a high profile disappointment due to being tied into a monstrously-popular movie. Plus, Atari 2600 graphics already looked very outdated compared to the graphics on Colecovision and Commodore 64, both of which launched in 1982.
yup it's kinda annoying too cause i imagine a kid begging for robux just to spend it on a simulator gamepass or all the premium users spending hours on the shitty anime simulators and the fishing game 😭
Ok... so as someone who grew up in the Atari era.. who experience the "golden age" of arcades... this whole "Atari crashed the industry with poor games that didnt match the box art and E.T. was awful" needs to stop. The Atari stopped selling in part because it was already 6 YEARS OLD by 83. Also, the Arcade crash happened that year too..nand that wasnt Ataris fault. Video games were starting to be seen as a fad that was ending in the US, but Japan and Europe never had a slump. Also, E.T. was not a "bad game" or "shovelware". I had it, i loved it, so did other kids my age. Games were simpler then. You accepted games for what they were. Its frustrating to see so many gaming channels just repeat the same misconceptions over and over again.
Yeah, my understanding is that E.T. isn't a BAD game, just rather confusing if you didn't read the manual. I'm grateful that nowadays we have the capacity and prior wisdom to have games teach their mechanics in-game!
I agree mostly, people just look at E.T through a modern lens. Like, are you really expecting a game from 1983 to be amazing? It was made with the expectation that you'd read the manual - not just plop yourself in and wonder what the fuck you're doing
@@Lo-SirThis is revisionist history. ET was bad for the time, it sold horribly, and reviewed horribly. Were people back then "looking at it through the wrong lense" or was it just confusing and poorly designed? Tar's Revenge is perfectly playable and fun today, ET is not and was not.
You can tell that judging by that kind of artstyle, you are gonna definitely know that it's definitely A.I generated bullcrap.. If only we had more stricter laws when it comes to A.I generated crap since of course it's just gonna get worst at this point.
Steam flags the games as using AI generated assets, so I think they had the right idea with that, make the people who don’t recognize it at first know what they are buying.
Perhaps a law that states that the box must disclose that AI was used at any point to develop the game, like "this product was made with the assistance of AI."
The fact the Switch eShop has this company who makes AI visual novels is crazy and should be reported to Nintendo. Aldora Games is the one who is doing this btw
Honestly, it's concerning how those Hentai games are even recommended at the top of the "new" pages. The eShop is a complete cesspool. This AI Hentai slop is overpowering real games made by humans.
That's because that's how they make people buy them. Put a price way higher than it's worth it (it it's worth anything at all) and then put it constantly on 90%+ sale so that it looks like a bargain.
11:00 if I blocked out RedDeer Games, I wouldve never found Sprout Valley or MIXX Island. The indie dev took them as a Publisher (unfortunately), but 99% of RedDeer games are shovelware slop (MIXX Island is pretty good too tbh), but blocking a whole dev studio can hurt more than it helps. U would get rid of all of their shovelware, but then if a good indie game/dev took those people as a publisher, u wouldnt ever find that amazing hidden gem.
Don’t you dare trash Kinect adventures, that shit holds a dear place in my heart. My total hours may only amount to 4 but those core memories were solid
Strict blocking and reviewing systems need to be put for these kinds of games. It might be very hard to just ban all AI slop games but if you have a system where if a developer has been blocked or reviewed very badly enough time they get their publishing privileges taken away it might work.
You know shovelware is getting bad because even UA-camrs who make a living off of breaking poor simulation games have started to note in their videos “there’s really nothing interesting for me to do here, I’ve seen this exact template of “run a store” game before so you already know what exploits I could come up with”. The fact that they have managed to ruin the BAD GAMES market is insane.
Carnival Games and DECA Sports aren't shovelware games. They might look like it, but they weren't. I'd wager you never played either. Also, the reason these actual shovelware games persist is because a lot of them have trophy and achievement lists that can be completed in a half hour. People buy them to boost platinums.
They look the part for sure. I never played deca sports, but it seemed like a cash grab compared to wii sports. It didn't help that alot of games were party titles to for the wii... when everyone knows Mario Party 8 exists :D
The issue is how incredibly easily it is to mass produce. You would barely need to do anything, in fact you could have a script just endlessly pump out these games without ever touching a coding program. At least with asset flips you had to flip the assets!
It happened as a result of the double-edged sword that is the rise of the indie market. Once upon a time, getting on a platform like Steam meant going through "Steam Greenlight." Devs had to put up a proposal to even get in the program, then you had to get voted in by users to get into the program. Getting on consoles meant even more stringent controls. But the availability of creation tools saw a swell of amazing indie titles that competed with the big studios. Braid. Fez. Terraria. etc. Combined with increased frustrations with AAA studios and corporate cash-grabs, and Steam and other platforms flung opened the floodgates to make it simple for indie devs to get their games released. The trouble is that when you drop the walls that were making it harder to get a game like "Osmos" to the masses, you're also dropping the primary filters and safeguards that kept out shovelware. The challenge is figuring out how to impliment restrictions that keep out crap while still allowing indie projects. NOT an easy task.
Dude it’s not even just the games industry generative ai ruins it’s EVERY CREATIVE INDUSTRY. Film? Yep. Art? Yep. Voice acting? You betcha. I really REALLY want to see heavy restrictions placed on it but being completely honest I know it’s not coming. Before long every company and their parent companies will see green and adopt this kind of thing. Like vultures to a corpse
I expressed concern about generative AI in gaming to a friend about a year ago, and a point I made was this exact phenomenon. His retort was that there were already hundreds of explicit asset flip games that made money as gag gifts on steam, and that good stuff will rise to the top anyways. I am an indie lover, and you hit the nail on the head in that regard. Ending Steam Greenlight and replacing it with no oversight was a gigantic mistake. All digital marketplaces should at least give games a once-over, this is hurting the medium.
Anyone familiar with the Xbox 360 indie marketplace knows that this isn't a recent issue. I don't think there was ever a time where shovelware wasn't made.
There should be an AI identifier for every release and a fee for uploading a game. Let's say 200 dollar would probably inherit most of these because now of them can make a profit especially with refund.
A huge factor in this is people like Penguinz0/Charlie streaming games like TCG Simulator and such, so obviously tons of people will throw together basic games to be the next big thing. It's actually kinda nuts how much of an influence youtubers/streamers can have. Remember the Starsector community exploding in popularity after the Sseth video lol.
shovelware never really disapeared, it just reappeared by the form of even more low quality mobile games and later on low quality steam games and the ones you talk about in the video
I honestly wouldn't care as long as it could be filtered in a way. Like, when I'm checking the Switch eShop for sales, I only want to see proper titles published by actual companies.
Whenever I check out the Nintendo E-shop, it always amuses me when theres a new simulator or tycoon game of some random job or career, where I can't imagine making a game out of it. And I question; are these kinds of games actually popular? It seems like theres a simulator/tycoon game for everything now. The amount of "Hentai" games on the E-Shop is also ridiculous.
A lot of those kinds of simulator games are actually very popular! Games like Powerwash Simulator or the original Supermarket Simulator can be pretty fun and a lot of people like them. There’s nothing wrong with those games. However the games you see on the eShop are not those. They are blatant ripoffs of them, usually of much worse quality.
1. No it's not making a return 2. Shovelware will always exist; that is why platforms like Newgrounds for the longest time used a judgement system. Any and all things that make making games easier are likely to generate shovelware through and through.
Honestly, I'm glad Shovelware and other bad games exist, because they make for the most entertaining UA-cam videos in my opinion. People who can make bad games entertaining and suffer for our entertainment do a great job, and those are my most followed channels for a reason!🤣
Lol no Greenlight didn't work at all since all the shady devs would just buy fake upvotes from Russian bot farms to get through. The "$100 to publish" rule via Steam Direct is way better, though scammers still found a way to exploit the system.
True, it’s just been hiding inside mobile games or steam and to be honest at least some shovelware steam games make you laugh how terrible it is, mobile games are just sloppy and boring, also infuriating how many ads you get per second and many pop ups saying “buy $10 a month to prevent ads!”
During the 80s in the U.K. there was a home computer boom and shelves in many shops were full of cassette tapes of games that were impossible to tell whether they were any good or not. There was no requirement to show the graphics on the case and graphics were so primitive that it wouldn’t have made much difference anyway. They cost anything from £1.99 to £5.99 which seems cheap but was a day’s wage for many people. It was a real risk buying a game. So, it was a good thing that piracy was so easy.
I’m glad somebody’s talking about this, I don’t even look at the “recent releases” or “coming soon” page in the Eshop cause it’s either some AI generated slop or a crappy hentai visual novel game 😭 one weird thing I do notice is that some of the characters in that hentai game you showed appear to be characters from actual anime… could this mean that these studios are just ripping fanart they find??? Is that how they just pump out 20 of these games a week???
Agreed. The shovelware back before this current generation of consoles was still shovelware sure, but at the very least there was..."effort" put into them by a development team and in many ways you could find some enjoyment and a slither of entertainment value from experiencing them. But now thanks to generative Ai models, there's more slop content spewed all over the EShop and they're produced at such a rate that I don't even know if many of these companies can think an effective counter measure to these "games". Steams review system is probably the best option at the moment because at the very least the income made from these games will be affected if enough negative reviews are left under a game.
The UA-cam channel Jim Sterling, who originally coined the term "asset flip", has been reporting on the problems with AI in games for years now. And they've been making videos about asset flips and shovel-ware in general for like 15 years. You should check their channel out.
Did you know that Michael Jackson's famous moonwalk was actually inspired by his pet chimpanzee, Bubbles? Legend has it that one day, Bubbles slipped on a banana peel and gracefully slid backwards across the floor. Michael was so impressed by the smooth, otherworldly movement that he spent months perfecting the technique himself, eventually debuting it as the moonwalk!
It’s kind ironic how I’n the 80s Nintendo was almost solely responsible for revitalizing video games amidst the 80s shovel wear , only to bring back shovel wear like never seen before with the Wii lmao
you know, i really miss when my shitty slop games were actually painstakingly made by real human people. it’s a shame
At least those mediocre games were sometimes enjoyable and not made by soulless AI
BIG RIGS
There was something oddly enjoyable about finding a game where the team behind it said "yeah we are making shovel ware but that doesnt mean i have to make BAD shovel ware" and then proceed to make a well made, funny, if slightly ugly game. When someone really loved their job as a developer, and you could tell, despite the ovbious shovelware.
@doodling-gods anyone remember that dirtbike game with physics, and you had to do cool flips on a 2d side scrolling track? Good times...
I wonder if anyone knows that Iranian GTA/Mafia like game about some private investigator, because i forgot the name lol
The fact that the Nintendo eShop has a ripoff game called "Call of Honor: Duty of Warfare" is proof alone that AI shovelware is out of control.
That's so funny
but this game is a good game tbh, at least there's a campaign,
The switch is overrun with a lot of ai slop, and it’s worse because most is targeted towards children or younger people with a “story” or “learning” not to mention outside of this is ai “h*ntai” games in the 18+ category
Call of Duty: Honor of Warfare
Battle of Duty: Counter Advanced Siege Ops
The worst part of the eShop is that they don't even hide the NSFW/inappropriate games for accounts under 18, or give you a choice for "Do not show me this". Steam has had it since the start and it has worked flawlessly
There not showing anything NSFW in the thumbnails or screen shots though its nothing worse than you see on a magazine or manga cover in a shop. They should have the tag feature to hide things though.
FR
The games are bait. Open the pages, they're all 12/16+
Steam only in the last few weeks or so made it so you could hide your adult game activity from the public eye (on individual games) without having to hide ALL your game activity. lol
its kind of insane how nintendo is fairly adamant about being family friendly and yet havent done shit about the eshop
Steam allows refunds trivially if you don't waste too many hours on the game, and the review system gives useful red flags, so while there are a LOT of bad games on Steam, they're a lot less likely to make money.
Great point! I really should’ve mentioned the refund system as well
iirc nintendo eshop doesnt allow any type of refunds? and also, I think it's pretty important, there's like no reviews or ratings there 🌚 i really don't like it
@@angelichourstonight Agreed, Nintendo eshop doesn't allow refunds or reviews. However, I was specifically talking about Steam.
Nintendo eshop has recently become something of a dumpster fire of shovelware. PSN too, to some extent.
Don't forget piracy exists and you can use it to try a game if there's no demo or anything before "purchasing" something.
You straight up skip the hassle of maybe getting a refund or not.
Even good games are likely to suck on Switch, because of poor optimization. And indie games are not exempt from this.
Generative AI has done so much damage to the entertainment industry and it’s still so young
It’s very scary to think about. It’s only going to get worse from here…
@ZackLillipad, what about AOH3 it has ai in it, but it's not shovelware. If you wanna know why I said that it's because I've played it and it's a fun game.
As if there wasn't already tons of cheap shovelware trash before, especially on mobile, mh?
AI is just a tool, don't blame it for something us humans created ourselves.
@@nobodyinparticular9640 you're wrong. generative AI isn't a tool, it's simply obfuscated plagiarism.
Its not AI little kid but good try. It's idiotic corporate leaders pushing ways to monetize games over actually making anything creative or trying.
The fact Nintendo has always been marketed as having family friendly games and then will allow AI porn slop to be on their “New games of the Week!” news page pisses me off they don’t even bother hiding it or having any age restriction whatsoever
It genuinely ruins my mood opening up the damn store on my switch
I gave up on reporting them because Nintendo just doesn't care. But they'll care about us playing an emulated 20 year old game you bought.
@@toidIllorTAmI genuinely so stupid, they took down so many games off of vimm not that long ago, if only they'd put in the same effort to manage their own store instead
Yet people simp for Nintendo for some reason
@@THEGOOD360I’m not sure there’s anyone who actually like Nintendo as a company, but their games will get people coming back for anything
Reasons like this are why Steam charges developers ($100 I belive) to actually put the game into the platform and gives the money back when the game creates $1000 of profit, making it harder to spam games
edit: changed $100 to $1000
It's when thé gâteau get 1000$ of sales
The gátéau
It's not enough though, Steam is still full of shovelware. They need moderation for any new games
The gâteau
Anyone else miss when they gave us the option to green light something? After they stopped that, we've been getting a lot of trash on the store.
I’ve done my fair research into the ai generated games on the eshop, and the main culprit is Alford games. They’ve been in the market for a while now, and it’s sad seeing the eshop filled with them. (I made a whole video about this if anyone’s interested)
alford? on the switch eshop most of the ai games seem to have been published by aldora games.
@@jclkaytwoit looks like they made a typo in this comment, in the title of their video it says aldora
@@jclkaytwomy bad, that was a typo for Aldora games 😅
@@octopie2950 can you edit the comment to reflect that then? most people don't read reply threads on comments
I wouldn't be suprised if its mobile shovelware ported to Switch.
I hate browsing the Nintendo switch eshop so much…
Not only is it filled to the brim with the aforementioned shovelware slop, but the app itself is barely even able to run properly. The painfully slow load times, complete silence, barebones UI, and the fact that I can only ever see up to 6 games onscreen while browsing is genuinely miserable
No crap modern phones have more power than the Nintendo switch let that sink in there console is very outdated Nintendo need to release switch 2
No way to rate or review games.
If a game is brokenly buggy, I should be able to know ahead of time. I should be able to warn others of my wasted money.
The eShop is a minimum of 90% shovelware bullshit. The rest is grossly overpriced digital downloads. $60 for a download when the game cart costs $40 from Walmart? Fuck that.
Then there's the eVoucher scam. $100 for 2 digital downloads... Some games are $60, yes. The elegible games cost as little as **$35**. How the fuck is that not blatantly ripping people off?
@@Harry-tm3ckmodern phones also cost 4 times as much. Stop flattering yourself
@@natsudragneel977 wow you just proved my point the Nintendo switch is very outdated
@@Harry-tm3ck Nintendo consoles havent been about high specs since before you were born.
Nice of these guys to put AI art on the covers so wise folks know exactly what to avoid. Remember when the eShop had reviews? Yeah, I miss that.
I don't remember any eshop ever having reviews. Ive had a 3ds and wii u.
@eightcoins4401 There was a star rating system that also allowed you to select certain tags, that helped give players an idea of what kind of game it was like. Far better than the absolutely nothing we have now.
Read this in a Hotel Mario voice lmao
@@Lo-Sir "Nice of the princess to label the shovelware with AI, eh Luigi?"
Most of the shovelware games on consoles is often played by trophy/achievement hunters. People buy them for those quick 10-30min plats.
Also easy speedrun WRs, i.e. iCarly for Wii
Yeah true
@@BinglesPwhat?
They should invest in games deserving of the effort.
I don't get why console gamers are so into completing trophies, I think it's a waste of time
Ai is the new comic sans to me. The moment I saw the cover for that super market game, I immediately scrolled past it.
EDIT: Apparently everyone in the replies love comic sans lol. Okay fair, fair! It’s got it’s fans!
I will not accept this comic sans slander. Anything that had comic sans still had at least a chance of being funny, this stuff just sucks.
@ dammit, you’re right 😅
@@tacticalyugo5357comic sans is worst than the ai games. Prove me wrong
@@firefree5282sans undertale.
@@firefree5282
Comic sans is actually good on a certain character.
A certain...
Skeleton
I understand Steam having zero quality control but the lack of quality control on the Eshop has always been crazy to me. Nintendo used to rarely have M rated games on their consoles now the eshop is girls gone wild 💀
Where are the angry moms when we actually want them?
@Copperkaiju We complained about them so much they disappeared and now we need them.
so you expect the company that made the wii, the unquestionable king of shovelware slop, to have good quality control for the games that go on their consoles but you don’t expect Steam to have it? I really don’t understand the logic behind that
@@libbybibby1579if you go into some game dev spaces, you see talks that it is really hard to actually GET onto the nintendo shops. I thought it was hard too especially when lots of my fav games didnt get ported to switch from console and it wasnt because specs but issues with the eshop itself. It seems like a lot of indie devs or hobby devs dont get their games on there unless its hentai 😂
@@libbybibby1579I think the problem is mostly about NSFW content
2:59 this is so funny to me because my grandmas retirement home has a Wii and the old people were going crazy on tennis
That's awesome LOL
Id love to donate some PCs so the elderly can get into video games. Maybe animal crossing, stardew valley, some tetris?
this gives me hope for Retirement Home LAN Parties
@@Lo-Sir broodwar fights in the retirement home
Seeing ai nsfw generated games infuriates me so much. I hope these game companies do something about that crap soon
@@takfahammgooning is still gooning prompting such on a kids platform is unacceptable, this argument is a strawman
Don't believe there will be another crash from AI. Casuals will download whatever is on the app store and pick up the yearly edition of COD and sports titles while the younger crowd will stick to Fortnite and Roblox. But like you said the AI slop is only affecting lesser known Indie devs.
Thanks, we're in short supply of pessimists these days
Yea seeing AI been just another tool for how complacent the market is.
@@topcatfanwhat did this comment achieve? Nothing.
And on the mobile front there's just a lot of Chinese games that are the exact same
@@toidIllorTAmI well it made a loser mad
I've noticed that a lot of games on the Nintendo eshop are just mobile games that have been ported to pc and/or consoles, this is a trend I've noticed lately & it's rather worrying, it doesn't help that the Switch store is a nightmare to navigate. This is only one of the many reasons why I mainly buy physical and mostly stick to my favourite gaming franchises.
Fun Switch Eshop fact: every week, roughly 12 pornographic games are released on the switch eshop
Despite my fujoshi status, I'm still a bit horrified that there's no setting to hide NSFW content. I may like (and purchase) erotic content, but the audience for Nintendo as a brand is catered towards children. Something needs to be done such as hiding NSFW content for under-18 accounts along with adding a general "Hide NSFW" that anyone can use.
Source?
@@cynicalia I don't see one, but I don't doubt it. It's still weird to me, even as a fujoshi, why there is no option to hide NSFW content.
@@ShirokoCycling lol why the big deal of being fujoshi
@cynicalia I consume this kind of content on the regular.
A type of shovelware you didn't mention are the trophy/achievement farming games. Games that just artificially boost your score in your profile. And those games are equally low effort that are spreading on Xbox and PlayStation.
Like what that idiot Rickster2344 always uploads every second day?
Hot wheels games fr
Zup series.
I don't even get how that matters to those people
At least those serve some (debatably) useful purpose in the market. "Pay money, get gamerscore" is at least a transaction with two sides.
Shovelware never left. Change my mind.
Agree
Shovelware did leave dont be dumb
@@Slurpee_Burger it didn't it just moves platforms depending on the trends
Gamemill games
Kong
Gollum
@@Momijitheawoo no it only existed on the wii
Part of the problem is that the EU might brand you as anti-competitive if you do anything about shovelware. During the DS era a French court already ruled against Nintendo for "excluding developers". Nowadays with the Digital Markets Act this would be far more devastating.
The EU tries not to make everything worse for everyone challenge (impossible)
@@johnnysaurus04 fitting considering it had the British in it at one point who are the biggest historical example of a country making everyone's lives worse
I'd rather have a wave of shovelware than the consumer nightmarescape that is the USA.
@@BarkleyBCooltimes *It's all a consumer nightmare.*
Just ban LLM use for games in the shops. Same thing many art sites have done with LLM pictures. It’s clear that there is no use for this technology in video games and it’s actively harming the space, so ban it.
Your forgetting Xbox 360 arcade which had devs who kept exploiting the fact Minecraft wasn't released on Xbox yet as well as Mojangs lenient copyright policy to spam the store with Minecraft clone shovelware
I mean, fortress craft was pretty good...
(Emphasis on was though, don't play the modern version, fastest refund I got myself to-date)
Yeah what ever happened to those? You’d think there would be dozens of the things on Steam.
Me and my friend group probably sank a good 300+ hours into Castleminer Z back in the day, it wasn't quite Minecraft but we still had a great time. I guess my point is at least the slop was somewhat worth it back then when Minecraft wasn't an option.
Hahaha I never payed for anything on there. I always wonder why someone would buy a fake Minecraft game for $5 but not buy the real thing.
@thebigpig2364 well there wasn't minecraft on the Xbox but there was on PC so
I remember when the Wii first released and my best friend got one for his birthday. We were sharing an apartment at the time and used to spend hours and hours bowling, havibg strike competitions etc. Played til sunrise on several occasions when it first came out. His Wii came with WiiSports when he got it.
Man, to be young again.
I miss you, Markee. RIP brother 🙏 ❤️
I'm sorry for your loss
o7
I want to see the return of the good movie liscensed games from the 6th and 7th gen. It beats unreal asset flip hentai slop that's overtaking the shops.
Same
I just want another Cartoon Network crossover game with the Cartoon Cartoons as the cast, man
I miss the harry potter games except for 7.
I think there's a lot of decent license games. They're kinda broader now to make a more creative game but we got stuff like Hogwarts Legacy alien isolation shadow of Mordor SpongeBob platformers made a return. Good stuff out there
Why would you buy a shifty hentai game when you can get a good one anyways. Doesn’t make sense.
@@mrziiz6893 better question: why would you buy a hentai game when you can browse Rule 34 for free
The AI generated covers and trailers on the PlayStation store are funny af me and my girlfriend were looking through them laughing last night
You ever see that super saturated 50 cent game? I so forgot the title but it was definitely someones first game 😂😂
Laughing at shovelware with your partner must be a fun experience. 😂
This is how we should treat ai lol. I find the dystopia ones annoying
The industry is in a very paradoxic position right now. Major corporations trying their best to push boundaries with how little effort they need to put into making games something thats just graphically competent while trying all kinds of new ways to fuck over their customers. Meanwhile the majority of people playing games right now are either not aware of this at all or simply forget about any controversies as fast as they happen with no real danger to any big game company to go bankrupt because people just cant stop buying their shit no matter what. The only way the industry would crash is to make the companies dissapear and even then people would left angry why they cant keep buying the latest always online microtransaction and battle pass filled slop anymore.
I feel the industry as a whole is trash. Very few games capture my attention these days.
Something I feel that is lacking in the industry is competitors to existing game franchises.
Ubisoft: How is this company still alive
Ea: Life simulation > Sims 4
Microsoft: RTS > Age of Empires, Warcraft, Starcraft, Age of Mythology, Halo Wars
Sony: (Press button for the game to play it for you)
Nintendo: Mario, Zelda, Pokemon, & bunch of great ips
Take Two: Every sports game ever, rockstar, & civilization games
Embracer group: Just owns too much
Tencent: just owns too much
^ Alot of these companies have either carved out themselves a niche when it comes to a certain genre or the simply bought up the industry.
There is lack direct competition when it comes to genres.
Everyone is gonna flock to microsoft for RTS, Bethesda, or ABK
Everyone is gonna flock to EA for sims or city builders (city skylines exist, but there isn't a lot of competition)
Everyone is gonna flock to take 2 for Grand theft auto, civilization, & sports games
Everyone is gonna buy the ps5 just to play their spidermans or nintendo's for mario, zelda, & pokemon
Where as Embracer group & tencent are just gonna supply mostly filler to the masses.
I feel like heavy regulation on MTS to the point where it's no longer a viable business model wouldn't be impossible to implement. Though that would first require useless governments to actually do something.
100% on the "majority of people don't know how bad the industry is right now" part, the amount of people nowdays that defend rushed games because "stop being entitled and just turn off your brain and enjoy things" is way too much
@@AlexiosTheSixth The complete lack for any frame or reference is what drives many to the conclusion that every game is the best there ever was and we are living in some sort of golden age of video games just because the grpahical fidelity of console games is now noticeably better than it was over a decade ago. All the while ignoring how these games can someday just dissapear forever, are full of nickel and diming features despite costing 70+ dollars with gameplay and content thats not going to want to keep playing for more than couple of walktroughs. Its depressing how these are the majority that are moving the whole industry along with their careless spending habits and impulsive purchases.
@@b4rs629Microsoft also has Minecraft (via Mojang)
I think that all store fronts should have a public review system so that people can be informed as to what they are buying. They all should also have a return system.
Xbox reviews are public idk why PlayStation and Nintendo aren’t but even then some companies use “fake reviews” like if you go. To mortal kombat 1 or forza on the Xbox store they both have a good 4.5-5 star rating but when you actually see the reviews they are all 2 & 1 star reviews being bombed. a couple of Ubisoft games lol.
@@b4rs629 actually technically take two owns both Rockstar and 2k😅😅 it’s also why I believe they have the new mafia game by 2k take place in the old country then the rumored 70s-80s Las Vegas one I been heading about over the years cause they don’t want to compete with GTA 6 a similar open world game from Rockstar.
@@b4rs629 oh my bad I misread you lolol😅😅
@@darklord9581 All good.
That's interesting point you brought up mafia and gta 6... about not competing with themselves. I didn't think of it at all lol.
Now that I think about it.
That's honestly how it feels with Nintendo & pokemon mainline & spinoffs games.
1:36 What is that kitten doing there? LMAO
He needed to bring a guardian to buy an M-rated game
He's buying gta 6 obviously
He a tiny boi
He's a pro gamer. He controls his human like the rat from _Ratatouille._ He's there in the store to make sure his human doesn't buy any shovelware.
He needed an adult to buy gta
7:34 when he actually starts talking about the return of shovelware
god's work man
lol
The history of shovelware wasnt that bad
This video felt like a really shitty video essay thank you so much
Just like Scott The Woz said, if the platform has alot of casual consumers their always Shovelware.
It mostly the market allowed it to exist, even companies try to filter it if people who was low standard still exist, shovelware will never go away.
This is why I don't people seriously when they say they play on mobile.
For every 1 good game on mobile... there is 1000's of trash games.
Even the best games on mobile are pay to win garbage.
Shovelware at a low point in the 6th gen? Shovelware was massive on the PS2 with garbage movie tie in games.
Yeah it feels like this video wasn’t really researched that much and was mostly just this guy relying on memory.
My biggest gripe with ai shovelware slop is NSFW games
You used to be able to find hidden gems, and most games were of decent quality. Now, for every fate/stay, there is 600 ai slop with the exact same gameplay
As i always told everyone: most people are coprophags and animefans - are coprophags among coprophags(asian culture cannot affect westernwired brain in any good way, mark my words)
Roblox is basically a super shovelware.
Bro it was made by a group of college students in the late 90s before being released in 2005 it doesn't even fit the definition.
@GUNUFofficial with "super" shovelware I meant that Roblox is practically a platform for random people to make shovelware in and using the Roblox game itself. You know, the thousands of usermade barely games.
Thus, the Roblox itself is a "super" as in "on top of."
@@davidsentanu7836 when you say it like that yeah I get it, it's gone from kids making "escape jeff the killer obby!" To greedy companies and people making mobile tier lootbox garbage. Although that kid aspect is still there, play groovydominoes games they're really good.
roblox went from having slightly quality games to being completely shovelware, i cant even open the app anymore without being bombarded by AI, oversaturated colors, and general slop made by child predators (cough cough Dandys World)
@@2ktwothousand better discovery:
The state of the Eshop is depressing, Nintendo has lost control of it for a long time and the lack of an algorithm, an AI only makes matters worse. The only tab you'll want to look at is "Great Deals", because that's where people are buying, and people usually (not always) buy decent to good quality stuff.
I think they're waiting to fix the Eshop on the next console, reforming it 100%, because even the slowness of the Eshop on the Switch is abnormal, especially compared to the system which is super smooth.
And especially when you consider the Wii U Eshop was running really smooth
Here are my thoughts (cuz I am so qualified and everyone wants to hear)
I don't think Nintendo ever predicted the switch to grow this large. It was never meant to stand up with Wii, PS2 and DS as such a huge platform. Thus, they didn't invest early on in a fully functioning search algorithm. They wouldn't have the capital or knowledge to design one, as they are not a tech company. This, they can't keep up with the unexpected influx.
Not a perfect explanation, they could hire another company to manage it. Though I don't know their thoughts on that.
This does seem to happen a lot with them however, as they don't have knowledge Sony and Microsoft do to run servers, or design software beyond games.
Tldr, Nintendo is ill equipped to deal with a problem like this.
yeah like I shouldn't be seeing adult games when I open up a Nintendo console's digital storefront
@@777idkineedausername explain how they aren't a tech company. I get if your saying that Microsoft has more knowledge with these kinds of algorithms, but Sony I guess does have more variety than Nintendo in terms of products, but other than gaming, they are pretty much just a hardware company. Making speakers and TV's is not going to be helpful experience for making a complex searching algorithm like making the most popular PC operating system would.
So there’s a whole other thing going on with those “hen tie girls” games.
They don’t actually have anything explicit in them, they just are featuring characters who were originally used in comics that do.
0:21 This happened a lot before Nintendo made it to America. Atari did this on almost all of their games.
Imagine not being able to hold in an "Um, actually...🤓". He literally says this like 60 seconds later😂
@@xrichie7924 Bold of you to assume I was correcting him. Also congratulations on finding this comment.👏👏👏
nsfw games are a given, nothing really wrong with them, but the fact nintendo is just allowing them next to kids' and family games without any sort of restriction HAS to be illegal somehow
are we not gonna talk about the kitten just chilling on that woman’s shoulder 1:49
I want to be that Lady so badly rn
That's a guy with long hair
This video needs more views, this is such an issue on ps5. It went from me wanting that tcg shop game everyone is playing on pc, to seeing 7 rip offs on the psn store. I almost bought one but thankfully i waited and saw how the game ended up with 1 star from over 300 people
I was looking for an unrelated games and came across this same issue for Lethal Company, there are two separate just related games called Lethal Corpo and Lethal Corporation, every popular game now just gets flooded with copies
OH THANK GOD IT'S A RIPOFF I THOUGHT THE ACTUAL GAME USED AI SLOP FOR A SECOND
Ok but Carnival Games was actually fun, I'd argue it's borderline shovelware
fr
Exactly. I feel like there’s a distinction to be made between straight-up shovelware and decently competent budget titles. Yeah, Canada Hunt and CID the Dummy exist, but titles like Carnival Games and Go Vacation seemed to have actually put forth the effort to make their gameplay engaging.
@@sirsoftspokenGo Vacation was made by Bandai Namco and is an actual unofficial sequel to Wii Sports Resort with a lot of improvements from that game like being able to fully explore the island on foot via an interconnected overworld. It's very high quality and is FAR from being shovelware even if it is a mini game collection on Wii with ripoff Miis. Calling Go Vacation (or it's prequel Wii Ski for that matter) shovelware is blasphemy. Those games are NOTHING like the actual shovelware Wii sports knockoffs like Deca Sports and Game Party.
go vacation mentioned, day improved
@@KrimsonKattYT As someone whose comfort game is Go Vacation, i wasn’t referring to it as shovelware, but as a competent budget title. It’s certainly not big budget like some of BN’s other offerings, like Tekken or one of the Tales games, but there’s a fair bit of love and effort put into making the game worthwhile. Shovelware it is not.
1:50 why does he have a cat on his shoulder
why not
also is it just me or does he kinda look like Kurt Cobain
Cute kitty
Lol
1. Because the Kitty wanted to be there.
2 That is actually a blonde woman. The cut is to a different scene, rather than just skipping the pan.
the shock i felt when you mentioned carnival games was UNMATCHED. i have so many memories with carnival games (particularly how scary the main dude was to me) and i didn’t know anyone else knew it existed
i have both the wii and switch version cus my dad bought them
my wii hasn't worked in 8 years so i don't remember that one, which is probably a good thing
i did play the switch version a week ago though. it sucks
@ yeah the wii one was horrifying 😭
Carnival games isn't AI generated and actually has some pretty decent gameplay. Enough for me.
I had so much shovelware on my Wii when I was young 💀 not my proudest moment
We all did, trust me 💀
@@ZackLillipad
This video was great my dude. I liked that you pointed out a lot of shovelware is mainly online these days & not in physical stores which is awesome because we can just go in and see if they have or not. I completely agree with the vid.
I never accumulated a large amount of shovelware on the wii or any console in general because I was always playing catchup. + I also never had a large collection of games either. I was in my early teens when the wii came out so I was more aware / concious + Alot of the games didn't appeal to me for the wii & same for the wii u. As I was getting into pc gaming for the first time in like 07 with World of Warcraft & other blizzard games that came after.
I had a few games that could be considered shovelware, but they were still fun to play.
Canival Games
Harry Potter & the Order of the Phoenix (Easily the best harry potter game for the wii)
Harry Potter & the half-blood prince (decent, but I noticed the dip in quality compared to order of the phoenix)
Sims 3 (horrible game design)
The rest of my wii games were
Guitar hero 3
Need for speeds: prostreet
Driver parallel lines
Mario Party 8
Sims 2 castaway
(Outside of nintendo 1st party titles especially for wii, wii u, ds, & 3ds... alot of games were straight up trash)
Even with the gamecube had some shovelware, but even then the quality was a lot better compared to the wii & after.
My gamecube collection was mostly the heavy hitters, a few filler games, but no shovelware. (This was the first console I had where I had more than 10 games & they were all great games as well)
My n64 I had like 5 games, but they were all pretty fun games.
Super Mario 64, Pokemon Stadium, Jetforce Gemini, Star wars pod racer ep 1, & WCW vs Nwo Revenge
I don't think E.T. for the Atari 2600 actually counts as shovelware because it was a heavily-promoted first -party title from Atari. I feel like true shovelware is third party low-budget/low-effort slop which doesn't get much advertising.
I think the most shovelware you got on any gaming-capable device in that general era on gaming was actually on the Commodore 64, where the bulk of games were sold on the exact same type of cassettes used for music so the cost of entry for being a single-person game publisher on the C-64 was simply having a dual tape deck for dubbing tapes, buying a stack of audiotapes, and maybe spending a couple of hundred dollars/pounds to advertise your latest mail order game in the small print classified ads in the back of gaming magazines of the day.
ET is like it is because it had half the dev time other games had at the time and the dev had made good games before so you can blame atari on it begin a mess.
@@Acidonia150reborn ET is probably also not the worst game on the Atari 2600, it was just a high profile disappointment due to being tied into a monstrously-popular movie. Plus, Atari 2600 graphics already looked very outdated compared to the graphics on Colecovision and Commodore 64, both of which launched in 1982.
agreed, ET sucked but it was basically a game jam game development time wise and actually impressive considering. they did try to make it good.
Scott Pilgrim, a Lucas Lee movie enjoyer, is not going to lecture me about videogames shovelware.
Considering his own game was great, I think he’s earned it.
Kinda wish you mentioned that Roblox itself has games that you could consider as shovelware
yup it's kinda annoying too cause i imagine a kid begging for robux just to spend it on a simulator gamepass or all the premium users spending hours on the shitty anime simulators and the fishing game 😭
Ok... so as someone who grew up in the Atari era.. who experience the "golden age" of arcades... this whole "Atari crashed the industry with poor games that didnt match the box art and E.T. was awful" needs to stop. The Atari stopped selling in part because it was already 6 YEARS OLD by 83. Also, the Arcade crash happened that year too..nand that wasnt Ataris fault. Video games were starting to be seen as a fad that was ending in the US, but Japan and Europe never had a slump. Also, E.T. was not a "bad game" or "shovelware". I had it, i loved it, so did other kids my age. Games were simpler then. You accepted games for what they were. Its frustrating to see so many gaming channels just repeat the same misconceptions over and over again.
Damn we got an O.G here fuck yeah 🤝
Yeah, my understanding is that E.T. isn't a BAD game, just rather confusing if you didn't read the manual. I'm grateful that nowadays we have the capacity and prior wisdom to have games teach their mechanics in-game!
I agree mostly, people just look at E.T through a modern lens. Like, are you really expecting a game from 1983 to be amazing? It was made with the expectation that you'd read the manual - not just plop yourself in and wonder what the fuck you're doing
It is not a "misconception" that ET was poorly received and sold horribly. Just because YOU liked it doesn't change reality lmao.
@@Lo-SirThis is revisionist history. ET was bad for the time, it sold horribly, and reviewed horribly. Were people back then "looking at it through the wrong lense" or was it just confusing and poorly designed? Tar's Revenge is perfectly playable and fun today, ET is not and was not.
You can tell that judging by that kind of artstyle, you are gonna definitely know that it's definitely A.I generated bullcrap..
If only we had more stricter laws when it comes to A.I generated crap since of course it's just gonna get worst at this point.
Steam flags the games as using AI generated assets, so I think they had the right idea with that, make the people who don’t recognize it at first know what they are buying.
Perhaps a law that states that the box must disclose that AI was used at any point to develop the game, like "this product was made with the assistance of AI."
@gircakes2 We need exactly that. But governments are either useless and too slow or bought out by the big companies.
The fact the Switch eShop has this company who makes AI visual novels is crazy and should be reported to Nintendo. Aldora Games is the one who is doing this btw
I still remember seeing a game called "Hentai Girls" on the front page of the Nintendo eShop and just being absolutely dumbstruck.
Honestly, it's concerning how those Hentai games are even recommended at the top of the "new" pages. The eShop is a complete cesspool. This AI Hentai slop is overpowering real games made by humans.
9:27 It still blows my mind how these ai hentai games go on sale the most
That's because that's how they make people buy them. Put a price way higher than it's worth it (it it's worth anything at all) and then put it constantly on 90%+ sale so that it looks like a bargain.
I miss movie tie in shovelware. Could you imagine an Oppenheimer game for the Switch? It would be awful but at least it would’ve been mane by people.
The ps5 store had shovelware titles simply called "the tiger t" and "the football t"
Don't forget "the pie P"
11:00 if I blocked out RedDeer Games, I wouldve never found Sprout Valley or MIXX Island. The indie dev took them as a Publisher (unfortunately), but 99% of RedDeer games are shovelware slop (MIXX Island is pretty good too tbh), but blocking a whole dev studio can hurt more than it helps. U would get rid of all of their shovelware, but then if a good indie game/dev took those people as a publisher, u wouldnt ever find that amazing hidden gem.
Don’t you dare trash Kinect adventures, that shit holds a dear place in my heart. My total hours may only amount to 4 but those core memories were solid
The controls may have been janky, the random photos it took kinda creepy, but that parkor minigame with the moving platform was my game growing up lol
Oh my god you too? Let’s go!!! Kinect Adventures was my everything.
Kinect adventures was one of the few legitimately good kinect games in my opinion.
The intro ends at 7:40.
Thank you🙏
I just realized this wasn’t about the Shovelware studio at 2:16
from roblox? cause that’s what I thought too lmao
Strict blocking and reviewing systems need to be put for these kinds of games. It might be very hard to just ban all AI slop games but if you have a system where if a developer has been blocked or reviewed very badly enough time they get their publishing privileges taken away it might work.
I don't think it will happen because money is money.
@b4rs629 No matter how little they're actually getting from them
You know shovelware is getting bad because even UA-camrs who make a living off of breaking poor simulation games have started to note in their videos “there’s really nothing interesting for me to do here, I’ve seen this exact template of “run a store” game before so you already know what exploits I could come up with”.
The fact that they have managed to ruin the BAD GAMES market is insane.
The video game crash was in America only.
Carnival Games and DECA Sports aren't shovelware games. They might look like it, but they weren't. I'd wager you never played either. Also, the reason these actual shovelware games persist is because a lot of them have trophy and achievement lists that can be completed in a half hour. People buy them to boost platinums.
They look the part for sure. I never played deca sports, but it seemed like a cash grab compared to wii sports. It didn't help that alot of games were party titles to for the wii... when everyone knows Mario Party 8 exists :D
Deca sports the goat frrr
AI generated shovelware isn’t truly anything new, merely an evolution. For the old and ‘venerable’ asset flip was the foundation it built upon.
same! i find it its like a more convenient tool to produce more shovelwares.
The issue is how incredibly easily it is to mass produce. You would barely need to do anything, in fact you could have a script just endlessly pump out these games without ever touching a coding program. At least with asset flips you had to flip the assets!
9:35 close enough, welcome back custers revenge.
Video begins at 7:58
thanks
Video ends at 11:54
Bro was yapping 😅
It happened as a result of the double-edged sword that is the rise of the indie market. Once upon a time, getting on a platform like Steam meant going through "Steam Greenlight." Devs had to put up a proposal to even get in the program, then you had to get voted in by users to get into the program. Getting on consoles meant even more stringent controls.
But the availability of creation tools saw a swell of amazing indie titles that competed with the big studios. Braid. Fez. Terraria. etc. Combined with increased frustrations with AAA studios and corporate cash-grabs, and Steam and other platforms flung opened the floodgates to make it simple for indie devs to get their games released.
The trouble is that when you drop the walls that were making it harder to get a game like "Osmos" to the masses, you're also dropping the primary filters and safeguards that kept out shovelware.
The challenge is figuring out how to impliment restrictions that keep out crap while still allowing indie projects. NOT an easy task.
3:35 I will not take this slander for Playground, that game was my childhood.
That’s what I can down here to comment, goated game
right?? I have such fond memories of playground lmao
Good lord
Agreed 100%, EA Playground is not even close to being “slop.” One of the better third party Wii titles out there
Came here just to say that lmao
Your video is fun to watch and your speech is so smooth to the point that's the video just ends quickly
Dude it’s not even just the games industry generative ai ruins it’s EVERY CREATIVE INDUSTRY. Film? Yep. Art? Yep. Voice acting? You betcha. I really REALLY want to see heavy restrictions placed on it but being completely honest I know it’s not coming. Before long every company and their parent companies will see green and adopt this kind of thing. Like vultures to a corpse
I expressed concern about generative AI in gaming to a friend about a year ago, and a point I made was this exact phenomenon. His retort was that there were already hundreds of explicit asset flip games that made money as gag gifts on steam, and that good stuff will rise to the top anyways. I am an indie lover, and you hit the nail on the head in that regard. Ending Steam Greenlight and replacing it with no oversight was a gigantic mistake. All digital marketplaces should at least give games a once-over, this is hurting the medium.
1:09 ehhh it was the American industry that was affected, everywhere else like the UK and Japan were fine
Plus PC games where mostly not affected
@@gn4128You mean microcomputer games. No one bought IBM PCs for games in 1983.
Anyone familiar with the Xbox 360 indie marketplace knows that this isn't a recent issue. I don't think there was ever a time where shovelware wasn't made.
There should be an AI identifier for every release and a fee for uploading a game. Let's say 200 dollar would probably inherit most of these because now of them can make a profit especially with refund.
A huge factor in this is people like Penguinz0/Charlie streaming games like TCG Simulator and such, so obviously tons of people will throw together basic games to be the next big thing. It's actually kinda nuts how much of an influence youtubers/streamers can have. Remember the Starsector community exploding in popularity after the Sseth video lol.
Just ban content containing generative ai from the shops. Issue fixed
This’s why I look at those “trophy hunters” with Shovelware platinum trophies with disdain
shovelware never really disapeared, it just reappeared by the form of even more low quality mobile games and later on low quality steam games and the ones you talk about in the video
Shovelware is the best content on UA-cam. It's just so entertaining watching others play and see how bad they can be!😂
I honestly wouldn't care as long as it could be filtered in a way.
Like, when I'm checking the Switch eShop for sales, I only want to see proper titles published by actual companies.
you're telling me browser shovelware games on FREE game sites have better restrictions over AI advertising and NSFW content than eshop does? 😭
I appreciate that you brought some solutions to the table instead of just complaining
Whenever I check out the Nintendo E-shop, it always amuses me when theres a new simulator or tycoon game of some random job or career, where I can't imagine making a game out of it. And I question; are these kinds of games actually popular? It seems like theres a simulator/tycoon game for everything now.
The amount of "Hentai" games on the E-Shop is also ridiculous.
A lot of those kinds of simulator games are actually very popular! Games like Powerwash Simulator or the original Supermarket Simulator can be pretty fun and a lot of people like them.
There’s nothing wrong with those games. However the games you see on the eShop are not those. They are blatant ripoffs of them, usually of much worse quality.
the NES and PS2 actually had LOADS of shovelware, it's just that the other consoles that generation were spared.
1. No it's not making a return
2. Shovelware will always exist; that is why platforms like Newgrounds for the longest time used a judgement system. Any and all things that make making games easier are likely to generate shovelware through and through.
Honestly, I'm glad Shovelware and other bad games exist, because they make for the most entertaining UA-cam videos in my opinion. People who can make bad games entertaining and suffer for our entertainment do a great job, and those are my most followed channels for a reason!🤣
Shovelware used to have this sense of stupid charm, but the AI stuff just feels so gross that it just makes me sad. I miss DataDesign…
"Most Replayed" at 9:33. You all need to go to horny jail XD
Steam used to have greenlight to weed out this type of garbage
god, i wish they added greenlight back (damn you HDTF!)
lol yea seeing there was with the amount of Unreal Engine survival crafting shvoelwares abandoned on early access.
Lol no Greenlight didn't work at all since all the shady devs would just buy fake upvotes from Russian bot farms to get through. The "$100 to publish" rule via Steam Direct is way better, though scammers still found a way to exploit the system.
They were the first ones to open the flood gates of shovelware titles.
You're funny dawg, Steam actually used to have a reputation of curation before Greenlight.
9:25
i did not expect this bombshell
shovelware never left in the first place
True, it’s just been hiding inside mobile games or steam and to be honest at least some shovelware steam games make you laugh how terrible it is, mobile games are just sloppy and boring, also infuriating how many ads you get per second and many pop ups saying “buy $10 a month to prevent ads!”
During the 80s in the U.K. there was a home computer boom and shelves in many shops were full of cassette tapes of games that were impossible to tell whether they were any good or not.
There was no requirement to show the graphics on the case and graphics were so primitive that it wouldn’t have made much difference anyway.
They cost anything from £1.99 to £5.99 which seems cheap but was a day’s wage for many people. It was a real risk buying a game. So, it was a good thing that piracy was so easy.
YES, I would love a not interested button! The 3DS had so much shovelware too!
I’m glad somebody’s talking about this, I don’t even look at the “recent releases” or “coming soon” page in the Eshop cause it’s either some AI generated slop or a crappy hentai visual novel game 😭 one weird thing I do notice is that some of the characters in that hentai game you showed appear to be characters from actual anime… could this mean that these studios are just ripping fanart they find??? Is that how they just pump out 20 of these games a week???
Agreed. The shovelware back before this current generation of consoles was still shovelware sure, but at the very least there was..."effort" put into them by a development team and in many ways you could find some enjoyment and a slither of entertainment value from experiencing them.
But now thanks to generative Ai models, there's more slop content spewed all over the EShop and they're produced at such a rate that I don't even know if many of these companies can think an effective counter measure to these "games". Steams review system is probably the best option at the moment because at the very least the income made from these games will be affected if enough negative reviews are left under a game.
At Least Old Shovel Wares was unique : you Have Bratzs , Ninja Breadman , Shoot Chicken
It's like the old 'ware but doesn't end up at Goodwill.
Thank you for this, I’ve been waiting for someone to talk about these ai asset flips
The UA-cam channel Jim Sterling, who originally coined the term "asset flip", has been reporting on the problems with AI in games for years now. And they've been making videos about asset flips and shovel-ware in general for like 15 years. You should check their channel out.
Did you know that Michael Jackson's famous moonwalk was actually inspired by his pet chimpanzee, Bubbles? Legend has it that one day, Bubbles slipped on a banana peel and gracefully slid backwards across the floor. Michael was so impressed by the smooth, otherworldly movement that he spent months perfecting the technique himself, eventually debuting it as the moonwalk!
This video is how I found out that Moorhuhn franchise is still running in the modern day... Wow, such a throwback to my childhood
5:48 Roblox released in 2006, years before the 8th generation of consoles 🗿
@Beamngedits123 I was talking about the 8th generation of consoles not the 6th generation of consoles 🗿
It’s kind ironic how I’n the 80s Nintendo was almost solely responsible for revitalizing video games amidst the 80s shovel wear , only to bring back shovel wear like never seen before with the Wii lmao
3:45 deca sports wasn’t that bad to be honest. It is definitely not shovelware
Still one of the best curling sims I’ve played shockingly
1:50 KITTEN SPOTTED!!! I love how that lady is casually buying with a kitten in her shoulder lol
Shout out to wreck it Ralph for the wii