PlayStation Quietly Shutting Down 13 Games on the PS Store on August 23

Without public announcement or warning to users, PlayStation is quietly delisting 13 games by a Ukrainian developer/publisher, reportedly for no reason. In an era when digital ownership is under fire, it does not look good if PlayStation is simply removing digital media, particularly when it is paid for.

Now, to be clear, it’s uncertain if PlayStation is delisting or hard delisting these games, and the fact that such a decision is unclear and quiet is even worse. If it’s a standard delisting, then those who have already purchased these PS4 and PS5 games would be safe; if it’s a hard delisting, then those who have purchased these games will just have them taken out of their digital libraries, no matter what. It’s possibly the latter, as it has been done before, and the fact that there’s no transparency around this and no way for the standard user to know makes it even worse.

13 PlayStation Games Are Permanently Shutting Down

Ukrainian developer Ternox Games recently announced that STONKS-9800, its popular Steam game, would not be coming to PlayStation 5 despite the work to do so. STONKS-9800 currently sits at a 97% overwhelmingly positive review rating on Steam and has sold 100,000 copies. Ternox had been working on a PS5 release, even planning to do a physical release before that was no longer possible, but then the studio recently announced that “Sony unilaterally terminated [the studio’s] PlayStation developer and publisher agreement,” without reason, and this process includes the removal of the following 13 games on August 23 (some developed, some published by Ternox):

• Nexoria: Dungeon Rogue Heroes
• Finger Fitness
• Retro Highway
• Unichrome: A 1-Bit Unicorn Adventure
• O-VOID: Console Edition
• Run & Jump Guy
• Scrap Divers
• Fox’s Zen House
• Boned Again: Survivors
• Dungeonloop
• IN-VERT
• Taimumari: Complete Edition
• Bullet Beat

While Ternox Games has confirmed this delisting is taking place, PlayStation hasn’t—and isn’t likely to. Ternox Games isn’t sure what happened, but a popular theory online is that Ternox Games’ selection of games was accidentally hit by PlayStation’s working Shovelware ban, where it is slowly removing some of the low-effort, low-budget games that plague the store. No one likes shovelware, and while Ternox Games’ library isn’t AAA quality, it’s standard fare and a solid library of indie games on the PS4 and PS5 consoles. If that theory is true, that’s even worse given ongoing issues of digital ownership (to say nothing of the fact that PlayStation could reverse this and still no one would ever know the real reason).

Sony recently confirmed PlayStation disc production would end in January 2028, meaning the PlayStation 6 will be a digital-only console with no option for physical release. That’s bad enough, but the situation is made even worse by the fact that digital ownership, the very term itself, is a bit of a misnomer since a game purchase is a “license.” And yet, purchased years before or a day before, this facet of digital ownership keeps creating issues.

This is obviously not the first time something like this has happened; it won’t be the last. In June, PlayStation removed 551 movies directly from users’ libraries, meaning anyone who purchased them can no longer watch them. No refunds were issued.