Sometimes, when my online friends and I get bored, we’ll scroll through the PlayStation Store, looking for the newest games we might want to play. That’s how we started noticing these weird Artificial Intelligence (AI)-generated games. They’d pop up right in the middle of the listings with covers so strange or unsettling that they would instantly catch us off guard.
The worst part is that none of these games ever even look good. The images are always off, the faces distorted, the lighting fake and the proportions wrong in ways no one can miss. Yet people still buy them anyway, which is part of what makes the whole thing feel so bizarre.
One game I stumbled across, called OF Model Simulator, genuinely caught me off guard. I found it just by casually scrolling through the store, and it was sitting there with AI-generated characters that looked a little too close to being explicit. Then there are the knockoff versions of trending games, made specifically to trick people into thinking they’re buying the real thing.
I’ve seen rip-offs of Schedule 1, and a wave of cheap Chained Together clones with stolen or AI-generated screenshots slapped onto the cover. These games exist solely to fool people who aren’t paying close attention. Somehow, they still end up with hundreds of reviews, which means the scam is working.
One of the strangest cases I’ve seen is the Tung Tung Tung Sahur trend. There are dozens of these games on the PlayStation Store right now, all based on the same bizarre AI meme. A few different developers seem to have made at least 25 different versions, each one just as low-effort as the last.
This problem isn’t just limited to PlayStation. I’ve noticed the same kind of AI-driven shovelware popping up on the Nintendo Switch eShop, too. The store descriptions are nonsense, the screenshots don’t match the games and the whole page feels like it’s being run on autopilot.
What used to be a home for small, creative indie games has started to look more like a spam feed. And that’s the real problem here. This kind of AI junk doesn’t hurt big titles at all, but smaller indie games absolutely get buried under it.
They’re pushed beneath piles of slop that all look the same and sound the same, with the same fake AI faces and fake promises. Years ago, my friends and I found a developer called “The Voices Games” who made some genuinely terrible games that were so bad they almost felt creepy. But at least those games weren’t made with AI.
They were bad because the developer didn’t seem to know what they were doing, not because a machine threw assets together. They’re behind bizarre titles like Lady in a Leotard With a Gun, Lizard Lady vs the Cats and a bunch of other weird junk that still feels more human than most of the AI trash flooding stores today. At least someone actually made them.
The amount of moderation failure behind all of this is wild. These platforms have approval systems, review guidelines and teams dedicated to preventing explicit or deceptive content. Yet OF Model Simulator and AI-generated explicit content slip through, while an original indie game can get buried three pages deep.
It’s like the curation process is slowly being replaced by an algorithm that can’t tell what’s real anymore. This feels like the natural result of how digital storefronts have changed over the years. Steam has been full of low-effort asset flips for a long time, and now the console stores are catching up.
Scrolling through PlayStation’s “new releases” tab feels like rummaging through a digital junkyard. What’s sad is that this used to be one of my favorite little gaming habits. I loved browsing for something new and weird and finding small games no one else had heard of yet.
Now, it’s hard to find anything real between the AI trash and the fake meme games. I’ll see something interesting, click on it and instantly realize it’s just another scam built on bad AI art. Maybe Sony or Nintendo will eventually clean house.
Maybe they’ll add better moderation or straight-up ban AI-generated store images. But right now it feels like the floodgates are wide open — as long as people keep buying these cheap AI cash grabs, they’ll keep multiplying. At least when bad games used to be released, they had some human charm.
The audience could tell someone cared enough to try, even if they failed. Now half of these games look like they were made by a bot in 10 minutes, and maybe they were. Browsing the PlayStation Store used to be a fun pastime, and now it’s just a reminder that even in gaming, creativity is slowly being replaced by automation.
Whitford can be reached at [email protected].
