It has been reported that as a result, 1,194 games have been removed from the PlayStation Store.
The Jumping Pumpkin
One of the first to notice the situation was streamer RobThanatos. He observed that all games published by ThiGames disappeared from the store. According to him, prior to the removal, ThiGames was the fourth-largest publisher in the PlayStation Store, surpassed only by Webnetic (1,222 games), Ratalaika Games (1,279 games), and eastasiasoft (2,018 games).
There is speculation online that Sony may have been dissatisfied with the low quality of ThiGames' titles. The company publishes obvious shovelware projects that gamers use to quickly earn trophies and level up their PlayStation accounts. For instance, in The Jumping Pumpkin, players receive a platinum trophy for jumping 500 times.
Notably, Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo recently announced the strengthening of their joint efforts to ensure gamer safety. It is possible that the ban of ThiGames from the PlayStation Store is related to this initiative.
According to estimates by GameDiscoverCo, by the time of removal, ThiGames' titles had earned a total of $9.37 million. The service's founder, Simon Carless, added that the scale of the "cleanup" is not as large as it might appear at first glance. He calculated that in reality, ThiGames had published only 153 games in the PlayStation Store, each having several regional SKUs. Nonetheless, this is still a significant number of projects.
Neither Sony nor ThiGames have commented on the situation.