Sony’s Live-Service Purge Comes Full Circle As It Announces Destruction AllStars Shutdown Five Years Later

Flashy vehicular combat game Destruction AllStars was one of the first exclusives for the PlayStation 5. It arrived in February 2021 to mixed reviews, just a few months after the console had launched. Rather than an exception, its underwhelming performance proved the rule for Sony’s live-service ambitions this console generation. The company announced Tuesday that Destruction AllStars will go offline permanently later this year.

“From May 26, 2026 at 14:00 UTC, Destruction AllStars and all associated virtual currency (Destruction Points) will be removed from sale at PlayStation Store and will no longer be available for purchase,” Sony wrote in an announcement to players today. “Single-player modes will remain accessible to existing users until Wednesday November 25, 2026 at 15:00 UTC when all server support for Destruction AllStars shall be shut down.”

Arcade Mode single-player challenges will ostensibly remain available to existing players who already have the game downloaded, but Sony isn’t making any promises. “Functionality and player experience may be impacted due to the server shutdown,” it writes. Any remaining virtual currency players still won’t be eligible for a refund. Instead, they’ll have until the servers go offline to spend it. Sony blames the immediate loss of online multiplayer functionality ahead of the shutdown on “ongoing technical issues.”

Originally set to be a $70 launch game, Destruction AllStars ended up delayed and downgraded to a $20 purchase instead, with paying PS Plus subscribers getting access to it for free. By May, the developers were already filling matches with online bots. The game got over a year of substantive updates, but things never quite clicked into place. In hindsight, it turned out to be a bad omen for the rest of Sony’s live service slate. The studio behind the exclusive, Lucid Games, has since been acquired by Tencent subsidiary Lightspeed Studios.

“One of the challenges we have in gameplay terms is we don’t have a direct reference point,” director Colin Berry said back at launch. “Making an arcade racing game, it’s kind of easy – well, it’s not easy, but it’s easier because you can go point at Need for Speed, at WipEout, right? And for us, it was kind of like, what else does this? Well, there’s a little bit of GTA in and our cars, but we’re not GTA because we’re a fast arena game and the characters have differences. There’s a little bit of this game, a little bit of that. So plugging it in and making that work together, the characters and the vehicles, was difficult on those. And it was a challenge to get that and to sell that message.”

Destruction AllStars‘ failure led to a reboot of Twisted Metal being taken away from Lucid Games, though that project would eventually be canceled anyway. With Destiny 2 getting its final update next month, Bungie’s Marathon still struggling to win hearts and minds, and Concord‘s ghost haunting the rest of Sony’s checkered live-service record, the AllStars‘ November shutdown will end up marking one of the more fraught and difficult chapters in PlayStation’s history.