PlayStation Is Surprisingly Shutting Down One of Its Own First-Party PS5 Games

PlayStation has quietly announced that it’s shutting down one of its own first-party PS5 games in a move that will take effect later this year. While video game shutdowns have become somewhat commonplace, it’s incredibly rare to see games published by PlayStation itself ever meet their demise. In fact, one of the only major instances of this happening was with Concord, which was ended for good mere weeks after its launch in 2024. Unfortunately, this situation will now be playing out once again, but it’s with a PS5 title that many might not be aware of.

As of this week, PlayStation revealed that it is going to be shutting down the servers for Firewall Ultra in September. Released in 2023, Firewall Ultra was a multiplayer shooter that was designed specifically for PlayStation VR2 headsets on PS5. Its predecessor, Firewall: Zero Hour, ended up being hugely successful on the original PlayStation VR for PS4, which led to PlayStation greenlighting a sequel at developer First Contact Entertainment. Unfortunately, Firewall Ultra wasn’t able to garner the same success, which led to First Contact as a whole shutting its doors at the end of 2023.

While Firewall Ultra has remained playable in the wake of First Contact’s closure, that won’t hold true for much longer. Specifically, Firewall Ultra will go offline for good on September 17th, with the game having already been delisted on the PS Store to prevent new purchases. Strangely, rather than announce this news to PlayStation fans in a direct manner, Sony simply went back to a PS Blog post from nearly three years ago and shared the details of this shutdown.

This Move Represents One of PlayStation’s Biggest Failures of the PS5 Generation

Firewall Ultra is merely the latest example of just how big of a failure PlayStation VR2 has been for PlayStation in this generation. PlayStation was never able to come close to replicating the success of the original PSVR, likely due to consumer fatigue with the technology and the high price point of the PSVR2. It can also be argued that PlayStation itself didn’t invest heavily enough in games for PSVR2, as Firewall Ultra was the only game published by PlayStation on the platform outside of Horizon: Call of the Mountain.

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Moving forward, it’s very unlikely that PlayStation will ever release another VR headset. Instead, the company now seems to be putting a larger priority on handheld gaming, with the PS6 reportedly incorporating a portable platform of some sort. Given how much success companies like Nintendo and Valve have found with handhelds over the past few years, this is a much more logical path for PlayStation to go down as the PS6 approaches its eventual launch.

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