Watching the embedded "gameplay" video, I can see why. It's a pretty obvious "pay us a couple dollars and we'll inflate your trophies".

I haven't heard the term "shovelware" before though.

It's an old term from the 90s for a high volume of low effort, low quality software. Unsurprisingly, the LLM era has resurrected the term.

Yeah, definitely used since at least the early 90s. E.g., InfoWorld magazine from 1990: https://books.google.com/books?id=pFAEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA16&dq=%2...

I've been hearing the term since Unity made easy (easier?) to create low effort assets flips.

It's much older than that. We'd call low-effort licensed games from no-name companies that were primarily designed to trick Grandma at Christmas "shovelware" as far back as the GC/PS2/XBX era, and that's just as far as I can remember seeing it in print.

Even older than that, they are the root cause of 1983 games crash on the US market, and why Nintendo's approach to a walled garden was welcomed with open arms.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983

I knew before I opened the article that this was going to be about or at least include the Jumping <Food> entries. Happy to be right, and for them to be gone.