Bad news for fans of The Jumping Burger: the PlayStation Store has excised the game, along with over 1,000 similar titles published by the same developer, in what appears to be an effort to clear the storefront of shovelware.
German publisher ThiGames had its entire catalog of at least 1,196 games silently delisted. The company, as pointed out by streamer and "trophy hunter" RobThanatos on X, published the fourth-highest number of titles on the PlayStation Store. ThiGames has yet to publicly acknowledge the removals.
One quick look at any of these games and it's easy to conclude that they're nothing more than easy ways to farm trophies. "Gameplay" of The Jumping Burger consists of pressing or holding the cross button to make a burger jump up and down, earning a Platinum trophy for players in less than five minutes. A totally separate game called The Jumping Burger: Turbo shortened this process down to less than a minute and a half.
ThiGames had an entire cafeteria selection of jumping-food games, including The Jumping Taco, The Jumping Pizza, The Jumping Churros, and The Jumping Nuggets. The publisher also released platformers and racing games that also took mere minutes to earn a Platinum trophy. These games only cost around $1.50 to $3 on the PlayStation Store when they were available, and the publisher regularly offered discounted deals for them--presumably to attract attention during big storewide sales.
Last year, Sony removed over 30 purported "slop" games from publisher RandomSpin. The move came shortly after an IGN report put a spotlight on a mass of cheap, low-quality games on major digital storefronts, many of which were accused of being asset flips, containing AI-generated content, or having misleading titles and descriptions.
Nintendo also seemingly made a move against the wave of slop last year, changing the way Nintendo eShop ranks games in an apparent effort to de-prioritize lower-priced shovelware.
www.gamespot.com
