Sony Announce Plans to Expand Its China Hero Incubator Program; New PlayStation Store Rules Make Some Interesting Changes

Sony might be looking to making new moves in China, as it attempts to battle it out with Microsoft in one of the largest gaming markets in the world.

According to Reuters, the company is looking to expand in the region by bringing back the China Hero Project program, which was shutdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The incubation program was created by the Japanese tech-giants to support Chinese developers and the games developed by them.

The plans to bring back the China Hero Project were unveiled by Sony at a livestream event in Chengdu, China. According to Sony’s director of China game production Bao Bo, the company will be looking to provide monetary funds of around 1 million yuan or $140,080 to every game that will become part of the program.

The upcoming batch of Chinese titles will be its third, following the first two sets of games the program enrolled back in 2017 and 2019.

PlayStation Store will now suspend shovelware and reskinned games

In other news, PlayStation has announced a crackdown on all shovelware games that’s currently available in its store.

According to Dex.exe, the company has sent a letter to its developers, notifying them about identifying games that have “spam” or “repetitive” content.

Titles will fall into the category mentioned above if they showcase the following characteristics:

• Products whose functionality and/or assets are copied or are not meaningfully different from products already published on PlayStation™Store, irrespective of the publisher of record.
• Multiple concepts and product variants, published by individual partners, that have duplicative functionality or experiences, differentiated only by minor variances of functionality or assets.
• Where possible, partners should consider aggregating small, similar content experiences into a single product, using in-game commerce to expand or extend the experience.
• As an example, supplying different trophies for each product is not enough to differentiate content.

With these changes, games that are created to provide easy Platinum trophies to players will now be considered spam.