Sony Walks Back an Indie Dev's PS5 Delisting
Sony cut Ternox Games off without a word, dooming 13 titles on the PS Store. After days of community pressure, the indie dev's catalog gets to stay.
Last week, Sony ended an indie developer's PlayStation agreement without giving a reason, and this week, it appears to have changed its mind. Ternox Games, the Ukrainian studio behind the anime styled stock market sim STONKS-9800, announced on August 21 that its games will remain available on the PlayStation Store, days after the platform had scheduled the entire catalog for removal.
The week that wasn't supposed to end this way
The story broke on August 16, when Ternox posted on X that Sony had "unilaterally terminated" its developer and publisher agreement without explanation. The consequences were immediate: 13 games, a mix of Ternox's own releases and titles published for other small developers, were set to disappear from the PlayStation Store after August 23. The PS5 version of STONKS-9800, planned for 2027 with a physical disc edition, was cancelled outright. "PlayStation Support refuses to listen to my arguments or even respond to my emails in any way," the developer wrote.
That silence is the part that stung the industry most. STONKS-9800 is not shovelware by any honest reading: an '80s anime flavored sim about a Japanese salaryman clawing his way up through the stock market, it holds an Overwhelmingly Positive rating on Steam. The community did what it usually does when a platform will not talk: it got loud.
Why this one mattered
The timing fed the worst interpretation. Sony has spent two years purging low-effort titles from the PS Store, removing more than 1,000 games in March 2026 alone, and observers suspected Ternox had been caught by an automated sweep. This is also the same month Sony confirmed it will stop producing physical games after January 2028, which turned the incident into a referendum on digital ownership itself. As players pointed out all week, a delisted game in a discless future is simply gone.
The reversal, if it holds, is a genuine win, and credit belongs to the players and press who kept the story in front of Sony until someone blinked. We should also say plainly what has not changed: no explanation, no apology on record, and a process that can still flip a small studio's console business off with a single email. Ternox's games may stay, but the power that removed them in the first place is intact.
STONKS-9800 is available now on Steam, and Ternox's Xbox and Switch plans continue regardless. We will keep an eye on what the PS5 port does next, because an indie catalog surviving its platform holder is news worth following twice.