PlayStation fans on PS4 and PS5 are not happy with Sony over an issue that is ruining the PlayStation Store and that it seemingly is either unable to fix or not interested in fixing. To this end, one of the top posts the past week on the PS5 Reddit page is a post calling out Sony for said issue. The post has over 3,000 votes up — a lot for the PS5 Reddit page — and over 300 comments that echo the sentiment.
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What’s the issue? Well, it is all the shovelware and scams that litter the PlayStation Store. The former is impossible to miss. Meanwhile, examples of the latter are often quickly taken down, but not before they scam many PlayStation fans out of money. Recently, there have been many scam games pretending to be Steam hits Schedule I and R.E.P.O. And they are apparently tricking PlayStation fans en masse, because sometimes these games sell so well they end up on the trending banners on the PlayStation Store. More than this, the top-selling VR game in Europe in March, Flight Simulator Delivery 2025 VR, is a literal scam game. It purports to be related to Microsoft Flight Simulator and is published by 404 Games, which tries to pass as publisher 505 Games.
According to the aforementioned Reddit post, Sony’s lack of a meaningful refund policy is fueling this problem and making it worse. For those unfamiliar with the policy, once the game is downloaded, you can not return it. Sometimes PlayStation Support will give you one free pass, or maybe even two if you get someone helpful, but that’s about it. Eventually your account is flagged and you can’t get any more returns.
“Yeah, shovelware/scam games are nothing new to digital storefronts, as Steam also has many, but the big difference is that Steam (and basically every other storefront like Epic, GOG, Ubisoft, EA, Xbox, with the exception of just Sony and Nintendo) let you actually test the game, then refund if it’s not what you expected,” reads the Reddit post in question. “The fact that you can be scammed out of $10-20 on the PS Store, because you bought a game thinking it was something else, based on what the PS Store shows you, is a huge reason not to browse the PS Store.”
The post continues: “It’s 2025 and digital purchases are the majority of the market, so we need the same consumer protections as we do for physical games, where you can just return it to the store if it’s not to your liking, or just completely misleading. If we could refund these scam games, then the number of them on the store wouldn’t even be an issue, as you can just refund anything that you’ve been misled by.”
Until Sony revamps its PlayStation Store refund policy, it is hard to imagine this issue being resolved. Sony has proven it is not going to moderate its own storefront, which is becoming increasingly a mess to use. That leaves only one solution: let PlayStation users return games, after they’ve been downloaded and played, within reason. However, this will cost Sony resources to implement and it will cost it resources on the back end from all the refunds it will have to process and reward. To this end, we don’t expect it to change anything until there is more pressure, which means plenty more of these type of posts in the coming months and years as scammers are emboldened by Sony’s lack of action.
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