Sony Just Cut Off an Indie Dev. Now 13 Games Could Disappear From PlayStation

Ukrainian indie developer Ternox Games says Sony ended its PlayStation publishing agreement without explanation, killing the PS5 version of STONKS-9800 and putting 13 existing games on track for delisting.

Imagine spending years getting your indie games onto PlayStation, planning your biggest game's PS5 release, and then suddenly being told your publishing agreement is over. No public explanation. Your existing games are disappearing next week. Your upcoming release is cancelled.

That is what Ukrainian indie developer Ternox Games says happened with Sony.

Ternox announced that Sony had terminated its PlayStation developer and publisher agreement and that its existing PlayStation catalog is scheduled to be removed from the PlayStation Store after August 23. The planned PS5 version of STONKS-9800: Stock Market Simulator is now cancelled as a result. Multiple outlets including VGC, GameSpot, Automaton and Kotaku have independently reported the developer's statement.

The strange part is that Ternox says it still does not know why.

The developer's original post

Ternox says PlayStation Support has not meaningfully responded to its attempts to appeal or understand the decision. The developer had hoped to release STONKS-9800 on PS5 in 2027, including a physical edition, but says those plans are now dead.

For a giant publisher, losing one platform might be annoying. For a small indie developer, losing access to an entire console ecosystem is something else entirely.

And STONKS-9800 is not some game nobody plays

This is what makes the whole thing especially weird.

STONKS-9800 looks like somebody found an obscure Japanese PC game from 1991, translated it, and somehow uploaded it to Steam in 2023.

That is very much intentional.

You play a businessman during Japan's 1980s and 1990s economic boom. You buy and sell stocks, collect dividends, purchase property and cars, run businesses, gamble on horse racing, play pachinko and try not to destroy your health by working too much.

STONKS-9800 deliberately recreates the look of Japanese PC games from the late '80s and early '90s. Image: official Ternox Games press kit.

And players genuinely seem to love it.

Steam currently gives STONKS-9800 an “Overwhelmingly Positive” rating. Among English-language reviews, 97% of 1,390 reviews are positive, while the store currently shows more than 3,000 total reviews across all languages. VGC also reports that the game passed 100,000 sales earlier this year.

That is not GTA numbers, obviously. But for a solo indie developer making a weird retro Japanese stock-market simulator?

That is pretty damn good.

Watch STONKS-9800 in action

Official Ternox Games video showing the recent Family Ties update.

Thirteen existing PlayStation games are caught in this too

STONKS-9800 never made it to PlayStation, but Ternox already has 13 games on Sony's store. According to the developer, all are scheduled to be removed after August 23. The list includes Nexoria: Dungeon Rogue Heroes, Retro Highway, Unichrome: A 1-Bit Unicorn Adventure, O-VOID: Console Edition, Scrap Divers, Fox's Zen House, Dungeonloop, IN-VERT, Taimumari: Complete Edition and several others.

Some of those games were not even originally developed by Ternox. The studio also acted as a small indie publisher, which means the decision affects other developers whose games were published through its PlayStation account. Ternox apologized to those developers and said it still has a small amount of hope Sony might reconsider.

That part bothers me more than the cancelled PS5 port. A platform holder obviously needs the ability to remove bad actors and enforce quality rules, but when legitimate developers can lose years of distribution with seemingly no useful explanation or appeal process, that becomes a much bigger indie problem.

Is this part of Sony's shovelware cleanup?

Maybe. But right now, nobody outside Sony appears to know.

Sony has been aggressively cleaning low-effort and trophy-farming games from the PlayStation Store, and that has immediately become the most popular theory around Ternox's removal. Kotaku notes that some older Ternox releases could arguably look like the kind of small, easy-Platinum games Sony has been targeting.

Reddit is split on exactly this point. Some r/PS5 users looked through Ternox's older catalog and argued that several games resemble trophy-bait releases. Others responded that even if an automated anti-shovelware system flagged the publisher, removing an entire developer account without a proper human review or explanation would be the real failure.

And STONKS-9800 complicates the argument considerably. Whatever somebody thinks of a few older Ternox games, it is difficult to casually dismiss a game with thousands of reviews and a 97% positive English Steam score as disposable shovelware.

The game mixes financial simulation with mini-games, relationships and a surprisingly deep life-sim layer. Image: official Ternox Games press kit.

Sony still has not publicly explained the decision

That is probably the most important detail to keep in mind.

We currently have Ternox's account of what happened. Sony has not publicly provided a reason for terminating the agreement, and there is no evidence proving the shovelware theory or some other explanation.

So it would be irresponsible to say Sony definitely banned Ternox for trophy games, criticism of PlayStation, or anything else people are currently speculating about.

We simply do not know.

What we do know is that a small Ukrainian developer says its publishing access was terminated, its PS5 project is cancelled, 13 existing games are scheduled for removal after August 23, and its attempts to get an explanation have apparently gone nowhere.

STONKS-9800 is still planned for Nintendo Switch and Xbox, while the PC version remains available on Steam.

And weirdly, the controversy may already be sending new players toward the game. Fresh Steam reviews posted after the news broke explicitly mention Sony, while commenters under Automaton's report said the story convinced them to buy STONKS-9800 and its supporter pack.

That might be the most indie ending possible: get kicked off one platform, accidentally get free publicity everywhere else.

Personally, I hope Sony at least explains what happened. Maybe there is a completely reasonable reason we have not heard yet. But if a small developer can lose access to a platform and the only explanation is basically silence, that is exactly the kind of thing other indie developers should be paying attention to.

For now, Ternox has until August 23 and one request for its community: make enough noise that somebody at PlayStation actually looks at the case.