Welcome to Delisted Games, a growing archive of 635 games you can’t play.
The site is expanding all the time with new additions, reader submissions, and a feed of Watch List news below. You can use the search bar to find any game — It’s powerful! Read some hints — or use the menus at top to browse our collection by platform. Thanks for checking out the site!
The 4-vs-1 multiplayer action/RPG, Breach, initially seemed like an up-and-coming contender when it debuted on Steam Early Access back in January. But just over two months later, QC Games has announced plans to shut down the servers at the end of April. Popularity and profits are to blame according to QC Games CEO, Dallas Dickinson, who confirmed the news on April 3rd. The following notice has since replaced the game’s homepage:
“Many of you have heard we are shutting Breach down already, but I wanted to share the specific details of the Breach wind-down. The game will continue to be playable and the servers will stay up through the end of April (4/30/2019), so that those of you who are still enjoying it can continue to do so. We won’t be offering it to new players, and have removed it from Steam and the En Masse channel. We have also adjusted the prices of in-game items and classes, so that those of you who want to play for that period of time can try it out with all of the content available to you.
The bottom line is that the game has not performed as we had hoped, and the changes required to make it a successful product would require resources we don’t have. We need to do right by our team, and offer them a reasonable, managed shutdown, rather than driving the game and the company off a cliff. This is a hard decision, but it’s unfortunately what we have to do with Breach.”
The announcement also laid out the following timeline, starting off with the game and its DLC being removed from sale.
- As of April 3, the game and its DLC content were removed from both Steam and EME.
- As of April 4, we turned off the in-game store, so that no new QC Points could be purchased. In addition, we reduced the prices on all in-game items to 1 Gold, so that players can buy anything they want or need to experience the game content freely.
- Player will be able to play the game normally until April 30, in Solo v AI, Coop v AI and Coop v Players modes (as well as Custom matches).
- There will be no further updates to the game.
- On April 30, we will be bringing the servers down permanently.
I’ve added the date to the Watch List calendar and will have a page up soon.
Bandai Namco announced via Twitter back on February 27th, 2019 that Lost Reavers, their free-to-play multiplayer title for Nintendo Wii U, would be shut down on May 30th. The game’s page at Nintendo.com offers a slightly longer explanation and timeline, and follows below:
Thank you for playing Lost Reavers! We regrettably inform all users that the service is scheduled to end on May 30th, 2019. We offer our sincere thanks to everyone who has supported this game. The termination schedule is as follows:
March 28th 2019 – Cease sales of paid items.
*Items already purchased can be used until the termination of service date.
May 30th 2019 – Termination of service.
*The game will be unavailable for play after the service termination date.
We thank you for your support and hope you will continue to enjoy Lost Reavers until the end of service!
While the date for spending real-world money on in-game items passed on March 28th, there’s still time for fans and players intrigued by the title to get in on the action. I’ve added the date to the Watch List calendar and will have a page up soon.
Polygon has a great post up about the unstoppable black hole that pulverizes mobile games out of existence (aka iTunes) that’s told from the unexpectedly hopeful perspective of developer HandCircus. Rolando was one of the earliest iPhone games I can remember but with Apple’s mandate to update older titles to 64-bit architecture, the entirety of the Rolando series has been unavailable since 2017.
HandCircus has since gone back and updated the original game in the form of a new iOS release, Rolando: Royal Edition. CEO Simon Oliver explains some of the woes of seeing their game get delisted.
”It’s been really difficult that nobody’s really been able to play it for years. It’s heartbreaking that it’s a big part of our history that hasn’t been available in the store. It’s been in the back of our minds, something that we’d really like to bring back, but it kind of got a little bit lost in the excitement of the early days of mobile.”
He also talks about the changes in game design from the early days of mobile to today and assures us that Rolando: Royal Edition is not going to be shoehorned into a free-to-play experience. On the subject of game preservation, he likens their efforts at bringing Rolando back from the dead to those of GameClub, a publisher created to help update and relaunch older mobile games.
”It is a really important thing [the work of GameClub], and I think on iOS and mobile in general, it’s been very difficult to have those experiences again. Those early games, those early iOS classics that disappeared — it’s been a real shame that I can’t play games like Flight Control or Incoboto, classic games that I remember being really inspired by. With Rolando, we felt very much the same mission of hoping to restore something that is a piece of our history, but obviously is a little bit of a piece of history of the App Store, as well.”
Although we don’t usually cover mobile games on the site the full article is a great little read with more tidbits I didn’t want to pull out.
Although it was just officially confirmed by Sony Europe, the writing has been on the wall since the end of January for the PlayStation VR shooter from 2017, StarBlood Arena. When developer WhiteMoon Dreams first received word from Sony that the game’s servers were going to be shut down, CEO Jay Koottarappallil took to the r/PSVR subreddit to announce the news directly to the community:
“Sony called earlier to let me know that they were shutting down servers. The call was something along the lines of “This is always a very hard time, but its time to shut down the servers”. There wasn’t a whole lot of detail past that and there was no option for us to support servers ourselves, much less make any new releases.
At the very least, we would have liked to have the option to pay for servers ourselves. Overall, I wish we controlled the IP that we created with SBA, because there’s so much more of this we want you all to see; but we’re not big and powerful enough yet to be able to command that.”
– Jay Koottarappallil, CEO WhiteMoon Dreams
Since January 2019 Koottarappallil has continued to respond to comments on his post but as of this writing no agreement has been reached with Sony to hand over the servers to WhiteMoon Dreams. According to Sony’s statement, StarBlood Arena’s multiplayer and online features will no longer be available as of July 25th, 2019. And as the game’s single player component also required a connection to the servers, the game will be completely unplayable on the same date.
Sony has already removed the title from sale on the PlayStation Store but PlayStation Plus subscribers who claimed it when it was added to the Instant Game Collection can still find it in their Download List. StarBlood Arena was also released on disc but given the online requirements physical copies will become unplayable on July 25th as well. I’ve added the date to the Watch List calendar and will work up a page for the game soon.
In the meantime, you can catch a candid recap of the game’s birth and death from Koottarappallil who appeared on a recent video posted to YouTube by PSVR Without Parole.
The news that Sony will be shutting down online servers for the Driveclub series of titles probably isn’t a surprise to anyone, but it’s still a bummer to read. The news broke on March 29th thanks to a tweet from Wario64 that links to Sony Europe’s decommissioned servers page. The full update on Driveclub follows:
Online servers for DRIVECLUB, DRIVECLUB VR and DRIVECLUB Bikes will shut down on 31st March 2020, 23:59 BST. All online features (including online multiplayer modes) will cease on that date. You will still be able to play and enjoy these games in single player offline modes. However, the games have significant amounts of online gameplay, so from 31st March 2020, functionality will be affected in the following ways:
You will not be able to:
– Use your season pass online.
– Represent your Club online in multiplayer events or tours.
– Play online multiplayer and compete in challenges.
– Create your own events.
– Compete in leader boards, or share stats and player progress.
You will be able to:
– Use your season pass on all single player and offline modes.
– Continue to play all game (DC, DC VR and DC Bikes) and DLC single player functionality in offline mode.
– Earn trophies in single player / offline mode.
PlayStation will cease selling DRIVECLUB, DRIVECLUB VR, DRIVECLUB Bikes and all DLC and season passes related to those games from 31st August 2019, at 23:59 BST.
It’s nice to see Sony give players a full year’s notice on the shutdown, although so far, these dates are specific to Europe. Sony North America has yet to make an official statement or update the PSN store pages for any of the titles. That said, these shutdowns typically happen around the same time across all territories so you’re probably safe assuming the March 2020 cutoff applies to all versions of the game.
For now, all Driveclub titles and DLC remain on sale from the PlayStation Store. Physical versions are out there as well for the original Driveclub and Driveclub VR but the standalone Driveclub Bikes was only released digitally and as DLC for the main game. By August 31st, 2019 that one will be completely unavailable.
For those with fuzzy memories (myself included), Driveclub was originally promised as a free title for PlayStation Plus subscribers but was delayed and scaled back into the 2015 “PlayStation Plus Edition”. This version was removed from availability later in 2015 but if you dig back into your Download List you should find that it has been replaced with the full original game. That’s a happy surprise after some not-so-great news.
I’ve added the dates to the Watch List calendar and will work up pages for the three main releases soon. Thanks to everyone on Twitter that sent us this news!
Photo credit: Sarathonux Kor on flickr
