Filtering Spam Games on Deku Deals

We want Deku Deals to be the best place to discover video games, connecting you with games that are worth your time and money. We’ve recently identified and taken action against a growing concern within our community: the prevalence of spam games on the eShop and other game storefronts.

We’ve recently implemented new measures on Deku Deals to tackle this growing problem of “spam games” on the eShop. Games that we identify as spam will have reduced visibility on the site, and they will no longer show up on our homepage or browse categories, e.g. Recently Released. We will never remove anything from Deku that's available on the eShop, but we don't want these titles to hinder users from using our most popular browsing tools like Recent Drops or Newly Listed.

What is a spam game?

Broadly, we define spam as games that a) don’t appear to be good-faith efforts to create something that people want to play while b) artificially inflating their visibility on the eShop and Deku Deals. These games flood sections of both Deku Deals and the eShop that promote recent sales, new games, and other ways to shop. This inconveniences our users and denies other developers a fair opportunity to offer great sales and interesting games to players.

We’ve noticed that these come in two main flavors:

Misleading games – These games have trailers, screenshots, or descriptions that don’t accurately represent what you’re paying for. They’re frequently named very similarly to more popular games in order to sow confusion. It’s very unlikely that someone who buys one of these games will be satisfied with their purchase after spending time playing it.

High-volume, low-effort games – There are a handful of studios that release a tremendous amount of unoriginal games, with a clear focus on quantity over quality. They might repeatedly re-release the same game (with minor edits) as a new title, or publish pre-made game templates with only light-modifications, or release games that appear to have been very hastily developed at a rapid cadence.

As it stands, both of these require demonstrating a pattern of bad behavior, so we’re focused on publishers who consistently try to game the system.

What are we doing about it?

We’ve identified 20 or so prolific publishers whose catalogs nearly entirely fall into our definition of spam. Their games will no longer show up when browsing on Deku Deals. (These games can still be found by searching for their names, and they can still be added to wishlists, collections, and custom lists.) This currently affects ~1500 games on the site.

We leaned on the Deku community to help validate that these games are indeed unwanted. Relative to other games on our site, these spam games appear in very few wishlists and collections, and they are very likely to be manually hidden by users. We’ve also heard directly from many of our users that they dislike seeing these games and that their presence makes it harder to find new, great games.

We’ve also noticed that this is a growing problem. 19% of the Switch games released in 2023 were spam, which is more than double the rate of previous years. We will continue watching this trend and will adapt as the bad actors change their tactics.

If you have any feedback about this, please get in touch at hello@dekudeals.com