Sony Quietly Delists 13 Ternox Games From PS Store on August 23 and Cancels STONKS-9800 PS5 Port

Sony is about to yank thirteen games from the PlayStation Store on August 23, and the developer caught in the blast radius is going public with the details. Ternox Games, a small Ukrainian studio best known on Steam for STONKS-9800, said Sony unilaterally terminated its PlayStation developer and publisher agreement with no explanation, killing the planned PS5 port of STONKS-9800 and pulling thirteen Ternox-developed or Ternox-published titles from the storefront on a single date with zero grace period. GameRant first reported the story on August 17, and the studio's own follow-up confirmed the exact removal date and the game list on August 18.

The thirteen titles on the chopping block are Nexoria: Dungeon Rogue Heroes, Finger Fitness, Retro Highway, Unichrome: A 1-Bit Unicorn Adventure, O-VOID: Console Edition, Run and Jump Guy, Scrap Divers, Fox's Zen House, Boned Again: Survivors, Dungeonloop, IN-VERT, Taimumari: Complete Edition, and Bullet Beat. Most of them are small-budget indie curiosities, the kind of catalog filler that pads out the PS Store between the AAA releases. None of them are headline Sony properties. The reason that matters is what makes the situation genuinely ugly, because the most popular theory circulating right now is that Ternox got swept up in Sony's ongoing shovelware crackdown, the slow trim of low-effort storefront listings that Sony has been quietly tightening over the last year.

What Actually Happened to STONKS-9800

STONKS-9800 is the only Ternox title anyone outside the studio's Discord has actually heard of, and for good reason. The text-based 80s Japanese stock market simulator has been sitting in Early Access on Steam since July 2023 with a 97% overwhelmingly positive rating across more than 3,000 user reviews and roughly 100,000 copies sold. Ternox had been working on a PlayStation 5 port, complete with a physical release plan that has since gone away. The studio announced last week that STONKS-9800 will not be coming to PS5, and the developer agreement cancellation is the reason. STONKS-9800 will continue to ship on Steam, Nintendo Switch, and Xbox, so the game itself is not dying, but the planned PS5 audience is gone overnight.

The bigger concern is what happens to anyone who already paid for one of those thirteen games on the PlayStation Store. Standard delistings usually leave purchased copies in your library so anyone who already bought a Ternox title can still download and play it. Hard delistings, the kind Sony has used before with delisted PS4 and PS5 games, remove the game from your library entirely even if you paid full price for it. GameRant's reporting flagged this exact ambiguity and the studio itself does not know which path Sony is taking, because Sony has not publicly said anything at all. There is no PlayStation Blog post, no PS Store notice, no email to affected customers, and no warning to developers outside the termination letter.

Community Reaction Is Split, and Both Sides Have a Point

The reply section under GameRant's tweet and the developer comments across Steam and Discord have split into two camps that are both worth listening to. The defenders point out, correctly, that most of these games have a handful of reviews and tiny player counts, and that Sony has every right to thin out a catalog that has been diluted by asset-flip shovelware for years. Calling STONKS-9800 shovelware is a stretch given its 97% Steam rating and 100,000 sales, but several of the other twelve titles would not survive a quality bar audit. There is a real cleanup problem on the PS Store and pretending otherwise is dishonest.

The critics are right about something more important. A studio with a 97% Steam rating and a real player base can be terminated by a single platform holder with no warning, no published reason, no grace period, and no obligation to preserve access for people who already paid. That is the part nobody should shrug at. STONKS-9800 buyers are fine because the game is still on Steam, but if you bought, say, Retro Highway on PS5 last month you now have no idea whether that purchase is going to vanish from your library on August 23. The Stop Killing Games movement has been hammering this exact issue for years, and Sony is once again handing them a fresh, easy-to-explain case study.

What Happens Next

Ternox says it is exploring other platforms for STONKS-9800 and the rest of its catalog, and the existing Steam and Switch versions remain fully supported with the same roadmap to a 1.0 release in 2026 that was already public. The bigger question is whether Sony explains itself before August 23, and history suggests the answer is no. Sony does not usually comment on individual developer terminations, and the PlayStation Store team has not addressed the delisting on social media or in a press release as of this writing. If you own any of the thirteen games, download them now and back up any save data that lives locally, because nobody outside Sony's legal team knows what your library looks like on August 24.

The Critical Pixel take is the same take we keep landing on every time one of these stories breaks. Digital storefronts are not libraries, they are rental agreements with a buy button on top, and Sony keeps proving that with actions louder than any executive interview. A small Ukrainian studio built a charming stock market sim that tens of thousands of people genuinely enjoy, signed a deal with the platform that owns most of the console market, and can now be cut off with one form letter and a removal date. None of that is illegal, all of it is the contract, and that is the precise reason Stop Killing Games keeps winning the argument in front of regulators. Buy the games you care about on disc where you still can, and never assume a digital library is permanent.