28 pointsby croes22 days ago2 comments

parliament3222 days ago
Watching the embedded "gameplay" video, I can see why. It's a pretty obvious "pay us a couple dollars and we'll inflate your trophies".
I haven't heard the term "shovelware" before though.
- add-sub-mul-div22 days ago
  It's an old term from the 90s for a high volume of low effort, low quality software. Unsurprisingly, the LLM era has resurrected the term.
  - garciansmith21 days ago
    Yeah, definitely used since at least the early 90s. E.g., InfoWorld magazine from 1990: https://books.google.com/books?id=pFAEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA16&dq=%2...
  - baud14725822 days ago
    I've been hearing the term since Unity made easy (easier?) to create low effort assets flips.
    AdmiralAsshat22 days ago
    It's much older than that. We'd call low-effort licensed games from no-name companies that were primarily designed to trick Grandma at Christmas "shovelware" as far back as the GC/PS2/XBX era, and that's just as far as I can remember seeing it in print.
    pjmlp22 days ago
    Even older than that, they are the root cause of 1983 games crash on the US market, and why Nintendo's approach to a walled garden was welcomed with open arms.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983
mtndew4brkfst22 days ago
I knew before I opened the article that this was going to be about or at least include the Jumping <Food> entries. Happy to be right, and for them to be gone.