It’s been a brutal week for the games industry. Xbox is seemingly imploding every five seconds, reports of potential layoffs are swirling, studios may be on the chopping block and everything is generally on fire.
So naturally, PlayStation has decided to enter the chat with one of the weirdest stories I’ve seen in ages: random games appearing on people’s PSN profiles, including some deeply awkward titles that would be a nightmare to explain to your parents, partner or anyone with access to your recently played list.
A Reddit thread on r/PlayStation has blown up after one user claimed that mysterious games had started appearing on their PlayStation profile, despite them not owning or playing them. That alone would be odd enough, but the comments quickly filled up with other people claiming the exact same thing was happening to them.
The story is already weird enough, until you read the names of the games. Users have reported titles such as Sex Store Simulator, Sex Shop Simulator, Hentai Princess, Quiz Thiz Germany, Horror Night with Tung Tung Tung Sahur, Avatar Island and, for some reason, Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare. Because apparently even the mysterious PSN gremlin enjoys a bit of Kevin Spacey-era Call of Duty between bouts of pretending to run a sex shop.
The funniest part, assuming this is indeed just a weird bug and not a security breach, is that some of these games are reportedly showing up with absurd playtimes attached. We’re not talking a few minutes here and there. Some users are claiming these mystery games are appearing with thousands of hours logged. Yep, thousands of hours on Sex Shop Simulator.
One ResetEra thread discussing the issue is literally titled: “My PSN profile shows that I’ve played an unreleased game for over two thousand hours.” That thread specifically mentions Sex Store Simulator as one of the games being added to profiles. Meanwhile, over on PSNProfiles, users are also discussing the issue in a thread titled “PSN account hacked…?” with several people reporting similar mystery games and absurd hour counts.
At the moment, the common pattern seems to be this: users say they have two-factor authentication enabled, they say there are no matching purchases in their transaction history, and many of them are reporting the same small batch of games. That makes it look less like a normal account compromise and more like some bizarre PlayStation backend issue, metadata error or possible exploit.
To be clear, there is currently no proof that these accounts have been hacked or accessed. There is also no official comment from Sony at the time of writing, so we don’t actually know what is causing it. Chances are Sony will never address it, either, because they rarely ever do acknowledge stuff like this.
Still, it’s hard not to raise an eyebrow at the timing.
Sony’s account security has been under renewed scrutiny recently after former IGN journalist and current podcaster Colin Moriarty publicly discussed losing access to his PlayStation account in what he described as a case of social engineering. Moriarty has since said he has been pushing Sony to address the issue, which has affected numerous users over the years. Many of them never got their accounts back.
That situation appears to be a separate matter from whatever is happening here, but it does mean that another weird PSN account-related problem showing up just weeks later is going to make people nervous. Rightfully so, too.
Again, this might be nothing more than a silly little profile glitch. A deeply funny one, admittedly, especially if some poor teenager now has to explain why Hentai Princess and Sex Store Simulator have appeared on their PlayStation profile with enough hours logged to qualify as a full-time job.
But as amusing as the story is on the surface, there is a slightly more serious question underneath it: how exactly are these games being attached to people’s profiles in the first place?
If this is just a display bug, Sony should be able to clear it up and hopefully remove the affected games from people’s accounts. If it’s something stranger involving storefront listings, profile metadata or an exploit being abused by shovelware developers, then that’s a much bigger concern.
For now, the best advice is boring but sensible: check your transaction history, make sure two-factor authentication or passkeys are enabled, change your password if you’re worried, and maybe hide the offending games from your public profile until Sony figures out what the hell is going on.
Because nobody wants to be remembered by their friends list as the person who somehow logged 8,000 hours in Sex Store Simulator overnight. Or maybe you do. Who am I to judge? No, scratch that. I’m judging.
WGB 