Sony Quietly Kills Destruction AllStars: No Notice, No Server Warning, No Refunds

Here is what Sony told us in June 2020, at the big PS5 reveal event: Destruction AllStars was going to be one of the console's launch titles. A glossy, chaotic vehicular combat game from Lucid Games, built by former WipEout developers and staff who had worked on the MotorStorm and Project Gotham Racing series. It would cost $69.99, same as Demon's Souls. Same as the new Spider-Man. It was positioned as a pillar of the PS5's early lineup.

Here is what Sony actually did, as of 26 May 2026: removed the game from the PlayStation Store without a word of advance warning, killed the multiplayer servers immediately, and emailed existing players to say the remaining server infrastructure shuts down for good on 25 November. The in-game currency is redeemable until then, after which it is just numbers in a dead database. Oh, and the Platinum trophy? Unobtainable. Forever.

PushSquare broke the story after receiving Sony's email, which cites "ongoing technical issues" as the reason. Here is the thing about those technical issues: the multiplayer has been broken since 2024. Two years. Sony never acknowledged it publicly. There are Reddit threads dating back to 2024 from confused players trying to figure out why they could not connect. Sony said nothing. Then, this week, they silently pulled the plug and delisted the store page as if the game never existed.

The full timeline is worth laying out because it tells you everything about how modern platform holders treat games that do not perform.

Destruction AllStars was announced in June 2020. By September, Sony had confirmed the $69.99 price tag, part of that generation's controversial price hike. By October, pre-orders were apparently soft enough that Sony delayed the game to February 2021 and made it a PS Plus freebie for the first two months. It eventually went on sale for $19.99 digitally and got a physical disc release at retail. People bought it. With money.

It reviewed decently, if not spectacularly. Metacritic sits around 65-71 depending on the outlet. Critics liked the core car-smashing loop but noted a lack of content and some irritating microtransaction pushing. Several reviewers said the bones were there but it needed more time in the oven. It never got that time.

Lucid tried. They reworked the game a couple of times, added new modes, tweaked the progression. The Discord community was active. But the player count never materialised, and Sony's attention clearly drifted to the next live service bet, and the next one after that. By 2024, the multiplayer had quietly stopped working. By 2026, Sony decided it was cheaper to scrub the game from existence than to say sorry.

This is not an isolated incident. It is the same playbook as Concord, which lasted all of two weeks before Sony refunded everyone and shut the studio. It is the same energy as the dozens of PS Plus freebies that become coasters the moment the servers go dark. The pattern is: announce with fanfare, underinvest in post-launch, let the servers rot, pull the plug in silence. Rinse, repeat.

The annoying thing is that Destruction AllStars actually had something. The character designs were distinctive. The car combat, when it worked, was properly chaotic fun. The on-foot sections added a weird parkour element that set it apart from Twisted Metal. It was not a bad game. It was an unfinished game that got abandoned.

And now if you bought the physical disc, you own a lovely piece of plastic that lets you play a stripped-down Arcade mode with no online features, no Platinum trophy, and a ticking clock on even the basic login server. If you bought it digitally, you cannot even download it again once it leaves your library. That is what "buying" a game means in 2026.

The game preservation angle here is blunt. This is not some obscure PSP title lost to licensing hell. This is a PS5 exclusive, published by the platform holder, sold at retail, with a single-player mode that relies partially on server connectivity. When the servers die completely in November, we do not yet know exactly what breaks. Sony's own wording, that "functionality and player experience may be impacted," is corporate speak for "we have not tested this and we do not intend to."

Sony is not alone in this. Microsoft has delisted Forza games. Nintendo has shut down eShops. But the speed here, the lack of notice, the fact that a game sold at retail five years ago is being partially memory-holed without even a blog post, that feels particularly egregious. At least give people a month's warning. At least acknowledge the two years of broken servers. At least pretend to respect the people who bought your product.

The sad coda is that the Wikipedia page for Destruction AllStars was updated within hours of the news breaking. Some volunteer editor, somewhere, dutifully recorded the delisting and the server shutdown dates for posterity. That editor is doing more for game preservation than Sony did this week.

So, in summary, another game is going. It may be because no one is playing it and if that is the case then that's on us. But, people have paid for a product that they should have the ability to use. To have that taken away, and to hide behind technical limitations, text in a EULA or any other reason really does not sit well. Once upon a time, spending money on something meant it was yours to use for as long as you wanted to. Now, even that is slowly being taken away from us.

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Sources:

- [PushSquare](https://www.pushsquare.com/news/2026/05/ps5s-destruction-allstars-delisted-and-disabled-without-notice-due-to-ongoing-technical-issues) - Original reporting on Sony's email confirming the delisting and server shutdown, including the full timeline of the game's troubled history

- [Wikipedia: Destruction AllStars](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_AllStars) - Game history, release dates, pricing changes, development background, and Metacritic reception

- [Reddit r/Games](https://old.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1tohx4x/ps5s_destruction_allstars_delisted_servers/) - Community reaction and confirmation of the two-year multiplayer outage that Sony never publicly acknowledged