Topic: Do you ever see shovelware/AI slop which is so close to being a good game?

I look through the eshop regularly and so pretty much see every single release including the asset flip garbage and AI slop but every so often I see one of them which has a cool core game if executed properly. I dont waste my time with them but I do think what if as in what if a game was made with passion from one of these.

Have you ever seen a slop game which could have been an absolute belter had it not just been churned out?

I'm just baffled at how the player count for Roblox's "Grow A Garden" peaked at 22 million.

Depends on how you define the terms. There are plenty of fun but not high quality games which use pre-made assets for example, especially platformers and puzzle games. I own a fair amount of 5/10 and some 4/10 cheap games in those categories which had some creativity but also some flaws. I wouldn't really count those as asset flips but one could argue. I enjoy short $3 games as long as there was at least some effort put in.

I've never seen one of the AI games which looked good but there are some decent games which didn't want to hire a cover artist so just stuck AI art as the eShop cover art — it makes the eShop window look less appealing but it doesn't change the game itself.

Not quite the same category, but there are a few publishers such as RedDeer games which push out both trash and good games and I've come across quite a few games from those publishers which could have been amazing but were held back by totally rediculous things like lack of a usable UI which indicates the game was just being pushed out far too fast.

For some context, I used to buy a cheap indie game every week so I have 100s of games which I wouldn't call shovelware but some of them are a bit close.