13 Ternox Games Leave the PlayStation Store on August 23 After Sony Ends Its Deal

Ukrainian indie studio Ternox Games says Sony has terminated its PlayStation developer and publisher agreement without giving a reason, and all 13 of the studio's titles are due to disappear from the PlayStation Store on August 23. The studio said on August 17 that the planned PS5 release of its stock-market simulator STONKS-9800 has been cancelled outright as a result.

What Ternox Games says happened

The developer and publisher agreement is the contract that lets an independent studio list and sell its games on the PlayStation Store. Ternox says Sony ended that agreement unilaterally, with no explanation attached, and that PlayStation support has not replied to its emails at all since.

The 13 affected titles break down into two groups: 10 that Ternox released itself over roughly five years, and three that other publishers it worked with transferred to its developer account. Losing the account takes all of them down together, including the three the studio did not originally publish. Ternox has apologised publicly to those partner developers and said the outcome is out of its hands.

Sony has not made any public statement about the termination, and has not confirmed or denied the studio's account of it.

STONKS-9800 is now a Switch and Xbox game

STONKS-9800 is an 80s-anime-styled simulation of the Japanese stock market. It went into Early Access on Steam in 2023 and holds an "Overwhelmingly Positive" rating there from more than 3,000 reviews.

The PS5 version was scheduled for 2027, and Ternox had hoped to pair it with a physical disc edition. Both are now off. The studio says the game will instead launch on Nintendo Switch and Xbox only, with physical editions for those platforms still planned. If you were waiting to play it on a PlayStation console, there is currently no version to wait for.

What the PlayStation Store delisting means if you already own one

A delisting removes the store page, which stops new purchases. It is not the same thing as a shutdown. As a general rule on PlayStation, games you have already bought stay in your account's download list and can be reinstalled afterwards, because the licence you purchased is separate from the storefront listing.

Neither Sony nor Ternox has said anything specific about existing owners in this case, so treat that as the usual behaviour rather than a guarantee here. The practical deadline is clear enough: after August 23, buying any of the 13 for the first time is no longer possible. Ternox has asked players who want them to pick them up before then, and is still hoping the decision gets reversed.

Worth checking your own library before you spend anything — several of these are older cross-buy releases, and it is easy to forget you already claimed one. It is the same housekeeping habit worth having when games rotate off Xbox Game Pass, where the removal date is the only hard part of the calendar.

The shovelware crackdown, and what is not confirmed

Sony has reportedly been enforcing stricter rules against low-effort shovelware on the PlayStation Store this year, and the timing of this termination lines up with that push. That connection is unconfirmed. Sony has not cited shovelware, or anything else, as the reason.

It is also a poor fit on the face of it. Ternox's catalogue is small-scale indie work with a genuine following rather than asset-flip filler, which is why the theory doing the rounds is that the account was flagged in error. That, too, is speculation until Sony says otherwise.

Where this leaves PlayStation players

For most people the effect is narrow: 13 niche indie titles vanish from one storefront next week, and one upcoming release skips the platform. The wider point is that a single account decision, made without a stated reason, can remove a five-year back catalogue from sale in under a week, and that there is no rival storefront on PlayStation to fall back on.

If you are cleaning up a PS5 library this week anyway, our guide to whether PS3 games actually run on PS5 covers what does and does not carry forward, and if your hardware is the problem rather than the store, we have nine tested ways to fix DualSense stick drift on PS5. For the Steam version of STONKS-9800, it helps to know how to appear offline on Steam before a long session. And for a recent indie release that did make it to every platform at once, see Duskfade's $29.99 launch on PS5, Xbox, Switch 2 and PC.