They Killed What I Loved: How Clone Factories Are Drowning Gaming in Garbage

I once owned a ZX Spectrum 48K with rubber keys and cassette tapes that took thirty minutes, sometimes a full hour, to load, to a soundtrack of screeching noise I could still hum today. Often they didn't load at all. The tape was worn, the head in the cassette deck was dirty, the signal was full of static, and after forty minutes of waiting you'd get "R Tape Loading Error" right at the finish line. So you rewound, cleaned the head with a cotton swab dipped in alcohol, tried a different volume level, and started again. Sometimes hours passed before you actually got to play anything. Then came the Amiga. I don't remember which game I fired up on it first, but I remember the feeling: that someone on the other side of the screen genuinely wanted to show me something I had never seen before.

Bullfrog made games that invented genres from nothing. Populous. Theme Park. Dungeon Keeper, which for the first time in history asked you to root for evil, because everyone else was already making you root for good. Bitmap Brothers poured so much visual and musical style into Xenon and Speedball that you could recognize their games from a single frame of box art. Team17 gave us Worms because someone in Wakefield thought it would be funny to arm an earthworm with a bazooka. Sensible Software made Sensible Soccer because they wanted football without pretending to be realistic, just pure joy in the act of playing. Cinemaware tried to make games feel like movies before anyone knew that was even possible. Psygnosis gave us Shadow of the Beast, Lemmings, and WipEout, worlds that looked like nothing you had ever seen.

These were small teams, sometimes two or three people in a garage, who loved what they were doing so intensely that it showed in every pixel. They took risks. They invented things. Sometimes it didn't work out. But they were always trying to make something new.

So I decided to check what's actually happening on Steam and in the console stores today. Not out of idle curiosity. I checked because for the past year I'd had a nagging feeling that something was off, that the same games kept coming out in clusters under different names, almost the same week. What I found is worse than I expected. This isn't a handful of isolated cases. It's a system.

The spark: a warehouse, a gun shop, and the same game three times in five days

Let's start with what I noticed myself. Over five days, between August 27 and September 1, 2026, three games landed on Steam:

Package Piles: Tidy Up The Warehouse! (Spectra Forge, August 27). Sort packages in a warehouse. Package Chaos (FunTap Games, August 28). Sort packages in a warehouse. Gun Shop: Tidy Up (kotcool, September 1). Sort items in a gun shop, the exact same mechanic as the two above, wearing a different skin.

Three different "companies." The same game. Five days apart.

This isn't an anomaly. It's the latest ripple in a much bigger flood. Ground zero was Librarian: Tidy Up the Arcane Library!, released April 30, 2026 by a studio called ArtRising, an unexpected hit with more than 17,000 "very positive" reviews and a peak of 29,469 concurrent players. You sort 3,072 books in it. The game is genuinely decent. The problem started right after.

PC Gamer's weekly column tracking the Steam storefront listed, near the end of August 2026, everything still coming out that month alone, not counting what had already shipped: Sort Them Ducks, Shelve the Potions!, Shelves & Sorcery, Mall Tidy Up Together, Konbini Cleanup, Storehand, Old Market Restored, Tidy Mart, Game Shop Panic, Big Bad Pharma, Package Chaos, Megastore Tidy Up Together. The writer added that September and the rest of Q3 had plenty more scheduled. He wasn't wrong.

This isn't a trend. It's a factory, and it has a name

When I kept pulling on this thread, I found something that shifted my whole read on this from "funny internet phenomenon" to "industrial process." It centers on a Polish publisher called PlayWay S.A.

PlayWay is not some anonymous shell. It's a company listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange, valued at its peak around 3.25 billion zloty (roughly $800 million), Poland's second-largest gaming company after CD Projekt. Its CEO, Krzysztof Kostowski, was dubbed "the king of cheap games" by Forbes. That title, unfortunately, is accurate.

Here's how it actually works, laid out plainly in the company's own financial filings. PlayWay spins up a new, formally independent company for every game idea. One documented example: a subsidiary called Septarian Games. PlayWay takes 73.33 percent of the shares at 10 groszy each, about two and a half cents. The developers get 21.91 percent, also at 10 groszy. Outside investors who buy in at the public offering pay 20 zloty a share, two hundred times more. PlayWay spends the equivalent of about $19,000 and walks away holding a stake in a company the market values at roughly $5 million.

Today, PlayWay's corporate group counts, by the company's own count, around 70 subsidiary companies. It had 44 in 2015. Each one is a separate "publisher" on Steam, a separate storefront page, a separate "development team," and, crucially for PlayWay, a separate candidate for a stock listing on NewConnect, Poland's junior exchange.

I also found what I think is the single most damning piece of evidence in this whole story: a public recruitment posting from PlayWay itself. I'm quoting it directly: "We will commission 10 simulator / renovator games (Unity / UE4)... budgets 250-500 thousand PLN... Profit sharing up to 50%." They order ten simulators at a time. Wholesale. Like a bulk order for screws.

A forum thread on RPG Codex sums it up without any softening: "PlayWay: Poland's premiere shovelware brand and the most wishlisted publisher on Steam." And players on Steam have been saying the same thing for years, in my own reading of these threads, with a growing sense of disbelief: "how they're coming out with a new 'BLABLA' simulator developed almost every day, by a random new company that has a few 'Blablabla simulator' games 'coming soon'... it just seems really shady."

This is not a conspiracy theory. It's a legal, publicly disclosed, stock-market-driven business model. Worse: it's a model in which cloning games isn't a side effect, it's a structural requirement, because every "new game" is also a new company to value, a new prospectus, a new reason for a retail investor to buy shares betting that the next cleaning simulator repeats the last one's success.

PlayWay is actually the well-behaved one. Look at what's happening on consoles

If you think this is a Polish quirk, or a Steam-only problem, I have worse news for you.

In January this year, Sony pulled more than 1,000 shovelware games from the PlayStation Store, every single one registered under one developer account: ThiGames. One account. A thousand "games."

Another developer, RandomSpin, shipped more than 40 titles on PlayStation in 2024 alone, including direct clones of popular hits: "Bodycam Shooter" (a copy of Bodycam by Reissad Studio), "Supermarket Simulator Pro" and "Supermarket CEO Simulator" (copies of the Turkish breakout hit Supermarket Simulator by Nokta Games), and even "Backrooms Brotherhood" and "Backrooms Inside The Escape." All of them, journalists found, were built from recycled assets and AI-generated images.

IGN ran a serious investigation into this in February 2025, talking directly to developers. The headline says it all: "'I Could Make "Fart Fart Boobie Fart: The Game" and Maybe It Would Eventually Get Taken Down': Devs Reveal Why the Consoles Are Drowning in 'Eslop.'" One of the developers explained the mechanism with unsettling precision: on Xbox, every game gets vetted individually at release, but PlayStation and Nintendo only run a one-time check on the developer account. Once you're approved, you can upload whatever you want until someone reports it and it gets pulled.

Nintendo's eShop has exactly the same problem. In July 2025, the company introduced tighter publishing rules in Japan and other Asian markets, trying to stem the flood of "eslop": games with misleading descriptions, faked screenshots, and titles designed to look like established franchises.

The scale you don't want to know, but should

Before going further, some numbers, so it's clear this isn't a footnote.

In 2024, Steam released nearly 19,000 games. Of those, 14,951, or 80 percent, ended up tagged "limited," which in practice means nobody noticed them, bought them, or played them. This isn't an industry with a bit of garbage sitting alongside good games. It's an industry where garbage is the overwhelming majority of new supply.

Since January 2024, Steam has required developers to disclose the use of AI-generated content. The number of games doing so grew from roughly 1,000 in 2024 to nearly 8,000 by mid-2025. One PC Gamer headline put it bluntly: at this rate, more than half of new Steam games will carry an AI disclosure by 2027 or 2028.

And the "sort a thousand objects" genre I opened this piece with? That's actually the mildest example. Search "Backrooms" on Steam yourself. You'll get more than 500 results. Realistically playable ones number around 150. One single publisher has 12 Backrooms games to its name, with five more on the way, and its most popular one peaked at nine concurrent players. Nine. The titles that came out of this tell you everything about how cheap and thoughtless the production has become: Backrooms Cats and Lava, Backroom Warfare II, Chained in the Backrooms, Backrooms Santa, Skibidi Gyatrooms.

In October 2025, during a single Steam Next Fest, seven nearly identical games launched about convenience stores and gas stations haunted by something sinister: Roadside Research, Hellmart, The Walking Trade (yes, PlayWay again), Shift At Midnight, Service with a Shotgun, [Herror] Gas Station Case, Before Exit: Gas Station. The PC Gamer writer covering it asked in the headline itself, "why this specific one, and why all at once?" He didn't find a good answer. Neither do I, beyond one: because it pays, and nobody is policing it.

The mechanism: why now, and why this fast

This isn't a new phenomenon, though it does have precedent. In 2017, Valve pulled 173 games by a studio called Silicon Echo "and associated accounts," 86 of them released within two months, roughly 10 percent of everything published on the platform in that stretch. Digital Homicide Studios, another infamous case from that era, sued critic Jim Sterling for $10 million for calling their games "asset flips." The suit was thrown out, and Steam removed their entire catalog. A community-run list on SteamGifts still tracks clusters of alias accounts today, one account, for example, publishing simultaneously under three different "studio" names.

What's changed now is scale and speed. Four things came together at once.

First, generative AI collapsed the cost of producing art assets, textures, even translations, down to almost nothing. You no longer need to hire an artist for a week to design package stickers. A prompt does the job.

Second, Unity and Unreal Engine, combined with ready-made asset stores, made the core mechanic (grab an object, put it where it belongs) essentially copy-paste between projects. Only the skin changes.

Third, the platforms themselves reward this. Steam's discovery algorithm favors fresh listings, so it pays more to release five thin, separate games than one solid game with five levels. PlayStation and Nintendo vet the developer account once, not the game, which, as developers told IGN, makes them "the easiest to scam."

Fourth, in PlayWay's case and similar models, there's a motive almost nobody writes about: this isn't only about selling games. It's a factory for producing companies to take public. A clone pays twice, once as a product on Steam, again as a fresh entity to list and value on the stock market.

What I feel, and why I'm writing this

I'm not pretending to be neutral, because I don't feel neutral. What I found while researching this disgusts me. Not because cheap games are inherently bad; some of PlayWay's flagship titles, like Car Mechanic Simulator or Cooking Simulator, were made with real passion and real respect for the player, before the mass-production model consumed the rest of the catalog. The problem isn't the low budget. The problem is that this entire industry has stopped pretending it's about the game, and started openly admitting it's about a product to be ground through a storefront algorithm and, in some cases, through a stock valuation.

The people who made the games I grew up on didn't have a business model built around mass-producing clones for NewConnect investors. They had an idea, a garage, sometimes two friends, and a stubborn conviction that it was worth trying to make something nobody had seen before. Populous didn't have three competing clones released the same week by three companies incorporated for that exact purpose. Worms wasn't made because someone noticed that "games with worms in them" had a good conversion rate at Steam Next Fest.

Today's clone factory takes no creative risk at all. It only risks money, and mostly other people's money: NewConnect investors, or players who buy something because it looks like last month's hit. It doesn't love the player. It treats them as a variable in a spreadsheet: time to purchase, wishlist conversion rate, the threshold needed to shake off the "limited" tag.

To me, this is a kind of grief for something that's disappearing, not just an industry curiosity. Cinemaware has been gone for a long time. Bitmap Brothers dissolved into history. But the spirit that was in them, the idea that a game should be something someone poured a piece of themselves into, is still out there. You just have to dig for it now, under tons of "Tidy Up Together 47" and "Backrooms Santa 2."

A word to fellow gamers: we're holding the remote, we just forgot it

What I've described above is on publishers and platforms. But there's another side to this story, and it's us. Us, the players.

This entire system runs because we let it. We all know the feeling: a countdown banner, "80% off, deal ends in 6 hours," "Coming Soon," a green "Wishlisted by 200,000 people" badge, a notification that a game just left early access. Something inside you says click "buy now" before you've even stopped to ask whether you actually want to play this, or whether you're just afraid of missing out.

I'd call this a digital Pavlovian reflex. Platforms have spent years training us exactly the way Pavlov trained his dogs: stimulus (a red countdown, a falling price, the word "limited"), response (click before it's gone), reward (a dopamine hit from the purchase itself, not from the game, which you might actually start playing next week, or maybe never). The more we repeat this loop, the less we think before buying. And clone publishers know this perfectly well, and they build their store pages exactly around that reflex: a familiar-looking title, a familiar-looking thumbnail, a low price, a discount timer. They don't need to convince you their game is good. They just need to make you salivate at the sound of the bell before you have time to think.

So here's my advice, from an old gamer who loves games and is embarrassed by what part of this market has become: you don't have to buy anything on launch day. Seriously. You don't. If a game is good, it will still be good in a month, in six months, on the next sale. If it slips out of your mind before you get around to buying it, that means you never really wanted it, you were just afraid of missing the window.

Give it time. Wait for player reviews, not just the trailer. Check whether people are still playing it two weeks in, not just on release day. Ask yourself whether you're buying it because you genuinely want it, or because it looks like something you already loved once, just cheaper and thrown together faster. Take the time you save by not buying yet another anonymous cleaning simulator and put your money and attention into a game you'll actually still be playing after one evening. Games like that are still being made, plenty of them. You just have to look a little harder than one click on a banner on Steam's front page.

And one last piece of advice I follow myself, blunt but effective: I wait a year. A full year from release, before I even consider buying. By then, a game has had time to get patched for its worst bugs, cleaned up from the mess that a launch forced by investors or a rigid publisher schedule almost always creates, because release dates are set by a quarterly calendar far more often than by actual technical readiness. A year later I get a product that finally works the way it should have from day one, and I'm the one who decides when I start enjoying it, not the marketing department.

For the same reason, I stopped buying early access games altogether. They go straight onto my wishlist now, and they stay there, sometimes for years. I only buy them once they officially leave early access, if they ever do. It's worth checking this yourself, because the data backs it up: in 2016, 90 percent of games released into early access on Steam never reached a full 1.0 release. Despite the fixes Valve has made since, a large chunk of the more than 14,000 titles currently sitting in early access won't leave it either. For some publishers, early access was never meant to be a step on the road to a finished game. It was meant to be the entire business model, living off impulse purchases made during the beta phase, because a finished version was never actually the plan.

The gaming market I loved won't disappear on its own if we keep feeding the clone factories with impulsive purchases. But it won't come back on its own either, just because we write about it and complain. It comes back once enough of us stop buying out of reflex and start buying by choice. That's the only real lever we have. Let's use it.

Publishers documented as mass producers of clones and shovelware

Below is a list of specific entities that came up during this investigation as documented cases, not rumors. Each one is noted with the basis for its inclusion.

• PlayWay S.A. (Poland): the mass-commissioning model described above, confirmed by the company's own recruitment materials and financial filings.
• ThiGames: more than 1,000 games removed from the PlayStation Store by Sony in January 2025, all registered under this one developer account.
• RandomSpin: more than 40 titles released on PlayStation in 2024 alone, including documented clones of Bodycam and Supermarket Simulator.
• GOGAME CONSOLE PUBLISHER LTD, VRCFORGE STUDIOS, WELDING BYTE S.R.L.: publishers named directly in reporting on PlayStation Store shovelware purges (TechRadar, Insider Gaming).
• Silicon Echo and associated accounts: 173 games removed by Valve from Steam in 2017, 86 of them released within two months.
• Digital Homicide Studios: the notorious 2016 Steam asset-flip case, whose lawsuit against critic Jim Sterling was dismissed by the court, with the studio's catalog eventually pulled from the platform entirely.
• kovalevviktor: according to a community-maintained tracker on SteamGifts, this single account publishes simultaneously under the labels KoloradoNS, RoboTeh Lab, and Virturian Games.
• galesoozka / Gales Corp: per the same tracker, also publishes as Leonsy, and is linked to the accounts Enoops and ImperiumGame.
• One Steam publisher, unnamed in the source reporting, with 12 Backrooms-themed games to its name and five more in development (per PC Gamer; the publisher's identity wasn't disclosed in that report).

Companies inside the PlayWay corporate group

PlayWay's group today counts, by the company's own figures, roughly 70 subsidiary and associated entities. Below are the names the company itself has disclosed publicly, on its investor relations page and in its "Who we are" materials:

• Ultimate Games
• Games Box
• Madmind Studio
• Code Horizon
• Rejected Games
• Frozen District
• Frozen Way
• Pentacle
• Imaginalis Games
• Rebelia Games
• Big Cheese Studio
• Total Games
• DeGenerals
• Ragged Games
• Stereo Games
• President Studio
• Console Labs
• Gameboom VR
• FreeMind
• Strategy Labs
• GameHunters
• Games Incubator
• Rockgame
• Paradark Studio
• Trigger Labs
• MobilWay
• 3T Games
• New Disorder
• Crazy Rocks
• CreativeForge Games
• Movie Games
• Septarian Games
• Play2Chill
• Atomic Jelly
• Baked Games
• ConsoleWay
• Demolish Games
• Digital Melody
• DreamWay Games
• Epic VR
• Game Formatic
• Games Operators
• Game Planet
• Gameparic
• Garlic Jam
• Glivi Games
• Image Power
• Iron Wolf Studio
• Live Motion Games
• Madnetic Games
• Manydev Studio
• Nesalis Games
• Polyslash
• Pyramid Games
• SimFarm
• SimRail
• Sonka
• Space Boat Studios
• Woodland

Not all of these make cleaning simulators. Some, like Ultimate Games or CreativeForge Games, are companies with real track records and their own identity that simply used PlayWay's early-stage financing to get off the ground. But the sheer size of this list is itself an answer to the question of how a "new company" manages to ship a "new game" almost every week.

Sources:
1. PC Gamer, "Games about sorting 1000s of mundane objects onto shelves is the new craze sweeping PC gaming" (August 2026): https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/steam-week-in-review-games-about-sorting-1000s-of-mundane-objects-onto-shelves-is-the-new-craze-sweeping-pc-gaming/
2. PC Gamer, "A torrent of janky retail sims continues to flood Steam, and there's no end in sight" (July 2026): https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/steam-week-in-review-a-torrent-of-janky-retail-sims-continues-to-flood-steam-and-theres-no-end-in-sight/
3. PC Gamer, "4 Backrooms games released on Steam last week, joining a list of over 500 cash-ins, parodies and legitimate contenders" (June 2026): https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/steam-week-in-review-4-backrooms-games-released-on-steam-last-week-joining-a-list-of-over-500-cash-ins-parodies-and-legitimate-contenders/
4. PC Gamer, "54 idle games released on Steam last week, and many look eerily similar" (September 2026): https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/steam-week-in-review-54-idle-games-released-on-steam-last-week-and-many-look-eerily-similar/
5. PC Gamer, "So, uh, why are there suddenly at least 4 sinister convenience store simulators on Steam at once?" (October 2025): https://www.pcgamer.com/games/sim/so-uh-why-are-there-suddenly-at-least-4-sinister-convenience-store-simulators-on-steam-at-once/
6. Steam store pages: Package Piles: Tidy Up The Warehouse! (app 5050640), Package Chaos (app 4996190), Gun Shop: Tidy Up (app 5050370), Librarian: Tidy Up the Arcane Library! (app 4197610), store.steampowered.com
7. StrefaInwestorow.pl, on Ultimate Games and CreativeForge Games, PlayWay subsidiaries listing on NewConnect (2018): https://strefainwestorow.pl/artykuly/20180628/Playway-spolki-zalezne
8. Gazeta Giełdowa, on how PlayWay's subsidiary companies are structured: https://gazetagieldowa.pl/spolki-gpw/playway-jak-powstaja-spolki-zalezne/
9. FXMAG Inwestor, on PlayWay S.A.'s cooperation model with simulator-game studios: https://www.fxmag.pl/biznes/model-wspolpracy-spolek-na-rynku-gier-symulacyjnych-czyli-jak-funkcjonuje-spolka-playway-sa
10. StockWatch.pl, on PlayWay group companies expected to list on the stock exchange: https://www.stockwatch.pl/wiadomosci/8-spolek-z-grupy-playway-ktore-w-tym-roku-moga-zadebiutowac-na-gieldzie,akcje,268588
11. Longterm.pl, history of PlayWay's corporate growth: https://longterm.pl/Playway-Historia-Sukcesu-Spolki.html
12. PlayWay SA, official "About us" page: https://playway.com/pl/o-nas
13. RPG Codex, "PlayWay: Poland's premiere shovelware brand and the most wishlisted publisher on Steam": https://rpgcodex.net/forums/threads/playway-polands-premiere-shovelware-brand-and-the-most-wishlisted-publisher-on-steam.139987/
14. Beef Suplex Gaming, "Opinion: Publishers Like PlayWay S.A. Are Bad for Industry" (2025): https://beefsuplex.com/opinions/publishers-like-playway-sa-are-bad-for-industry/
15. TechRadar, "Sony removes a selection of 'spam' games from its storefront as it continues its battle against shovelware": https://www.techradar.com/gaming/sony-removes-a-selection-of-spam-games-from-its-storefront-as-it-continues-its-battle-against-shovelware
16. TechRadar, "Supermarket Simulator Pro is no more as a number of 'spam' games are removed from the PS Store": https://www.techradar.com/gaming/supermarket-simulator-pro-is-no-more-as-a-number-of-spam-games-are-removed-from-the-ps-store
17. HowToGeek, "PlayStation Is Booting Shovelware From the PS Store" (February 2025): https://www.howtogeek.com/playstation-removes-shovelware-from-ps-store/
18. Insider Gaming, "PlayStation Might Be Cracking Down on 'Shovelware' Spam Games": https://insider-gaming.com/shovelware-playstation-crack-down-spam/
19. Kotaku, "PlayStation Removes Slop From PSN Store Following Report": https://kotaku.com/playstation-removes-shovelware-slop-psn-store-ps5-ps4-1851759704
20. Push Square, "Report Investigates Why PS5's Store Is Still Drowning in 'Eslop'" (developer quote on Nintendo, February 2025): https://www.pushsquare.com/news/2025/02/report-investigates-why-ps5s-store-is-still-drowning-in-eslop
21. NotebookCheck, "The Nintendo eShop in some regions now filters out shovelware from other Switch and Switch 2 games" (July 2025): https://www.notebookcheck.net/The-Nintendo-eShop-in-some-regions-now-filters-out-shovelware-from-other-Switch-and-Switch-2-games.1058034.0.html
22. NotebookCheck, "Analysis: Nearly 8,000 games on Steam have AI generated content": https://www.notebookcheck.net/Analysis-Nearly-8-000-games-on-Steam-have-AI-generated-content.1060558.0.html
23. NotebookCheck, "Steam Next Fest flooded with AI slop and low-effort demos, users tell Valve": https://www.notebookcheck.net/Steam-Next-Fest-flooded-with-AI-slop-and-low-effort-demos-users-tell-Valve.1233436.0.html
24. The Register, "If you're gonna use AI-made stuff in your game, you better tell us, says Steam" (2024): https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/10/developers_steam_ai/
25. Wikipedia, "Asset flip" (the Silicon Echo case, 2017): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asset_flip
26. SteamGifts, "List of Shovelware Developers/Publishers who are using FOMO and clutter the Steam store": https://www.steamgifts.com/discussion/h7fmQ/list-of-shovelware-developerspublishers-who-are-using-fomo-and-clutter-the-steam-store
27. PC Gamer, "Steam sends 90 low-effort asset-flips and bootleg games off to the great trashcan fire in the sky" (2023): https://www.pcgamer.com/steam-sends-90-low-effort-asset-flips-and-bootleg-games-off-to-the-great-trashcan-fire-in-the-sky/
28. Steam Community, player discussions on PlayWay's publishing model: https://steamcommunity.com/app/621060/discussions/0/1679189548069094043/ and https://steamcommunity.com/app/641320/discussions/0/6364229920742975867
29. WN Hub, "What You Need to Know When Releasing a Game in Early Access: Release Statistics and Practical Tips" (the 2016 figure of 90 percent of early access games never reaching 1.0): https://wnhub.io/news/other/item-47866
30. WN Hub, "More than half of the games on Steam have been in early access for less than a year" (GDC 2025 data on more than 14,000 games currently in early access): https://wnhub.io/news/stores-and-publishing/item-47434
31. PlayWay SA, "Who we are" (official list of subsidiary and associated companies): https://playway.com/pl/spolka/kim-jestesmy
32. PlayWay SA, "Capital group" (ownership stakes in each subsidiary): https://playway.com/pl/spolka/grupa-kapitalowa
33. PlayWay SA, Investor Relations / GPW (full list of group brands and companies): https://playway.com/relacje-inwestorskie-gpw