Even in this digital age, sadly, nothing lasts forever. Purchasing and playing games are easier today than it has ever been, be it digitally, physically, or through a subscription. However, the flip side is that once a game finds itself delisted off of digital stores, there’s pretty much no way to play it ever again.
Of course, there are cases where downloaded versions of some games remain offline on Playstation 4 consoles even after they’ve been pulled off the stores. Hidden away in the hard drives that got them before their extinction, such games are locked away, becoming collector’s items in no time. When it comes to the PS4, there exist many such titles that gamers can no longer play.
8 The Tomorrow Children
The Tomorrow Children was a free-to-play online multiplayer game with a bizarre plot. Players were to come together and rebuild civilization, with themes of socialism, soviet experiments, and just a general overall creepy vibe running throughout the game. Of course, the game also had in-game monetization.
With a reception that left players and critics more bewildered than impressed, The Tomorrow Children was unable to stay afloat for too long. Developer Q-Games shut down the online services for the game in November 2017. But hey, if the premise still sounds interesting, don’t worry- The Tomorrow Children is set to return soon. Q-Games have promised to rebuild the game and breathe new life into it after its 4-year hiatus.
7 The Legend Of Korra
Licensing issues are what brought about the demise of The Legend of Korra on the Playstation 4. Despite the popularity of the IP, and the game letting players into the world of Korra and Avatar, the publishers never ended up going through with a physical release for the game. This made The Legend of Korra digital-only.
It gained only mild reviews, blamed for not doing anything new and sticking to a formulaic structure. Ultimately, The Legend of Korra was delisted at the end of 2017, much like many other Activision games whose licenses had expired.
6 Wander
Developer Wander’s Wander (yeah, we know how that sounds) seemed to have taken its name quite literally. As the player, fans were dropped on an island, where their job was to – you guessed it – wander around. With a barely put-together story that reeked of laziness, broken game mechanics, and surfaces that spent half their time wildly clipping, Wander was received terribly, and rightfully so.
Surprisingly, it wasn’t the terribly negative reception that took Wander off the Playstation Store, but a conflict between the developers and CryTek, who’d much rather forget that their championed engine was used to create this dud of a game.
5 LawBreakers
Boss Key Productions introduced LawBreakers in August 2017 as an online-only multiplayer FPS, with nine character options, gravity-defying maps & combat situations, and new twists on pre-existent FPS modes. Sadly, back in 2017, the multiplayer-only game failed to garner a customer base with its $40 price tag.
Those who did play the game gave it good reviews, but sadly for the developers, the game was unable to retain a player base for very long. Delisted officially in September 2018, LawBreakers died a year from release. Perhaps some battle-pass shenanigans might have helped the game, but all that came a year later for the industry.
4 Daylight
A first-person horror game with a phone camera as its central mechanic doesn’t sound terrible on paper. Developed by Zombie Studios and published by Atlus, Daylight went down in history as the first game to use the Unreal Engine 4. Critiqued for being formulaic and using Slender-like systems, Daylight never got much positive reception and was taken down from the Playstation store in 2020, five years after publishers Atlus shut down.
In fact, Daylight holds the record for being the worst-rated Atlus game. Fortunately, there are way better survival horror games out there that players can experience.
3 Don’t Even Think
Launched as a battle-royale game with a different take on the genre, Don’t Even Think, by Dark Horse Game Studio, only saw the light of day for a mere 11 months before being taken down in June 2020. With an asymmetrical PvP survival format, Don’t Even Think put players against hordes of werewolves in a battle royale setting. Barely marketed, and seldomly well, Don’t Even Think never developed much of a player base to begin with......and failed to retain any of it.
2 Growtopia
Ubisoft’s massively multiplayer online game was released way back in 2012 for mobile platforms, where it continued to perform solidly for several years. When developed and released for the Playstation 4 in 2019, the game didn’t do nearly as well.
The game didn't garner enough of a player base on the console. Failing to have generated enough income through microtransactions to stay afloat, Ubisoft had to shut down Growtopia’s console servers for good, two years after it graced the digital PS store.
1 P.T.
The playable trailer to Konami’ s canceled Silent Hill reboot holds the torch when it comes to canceled PS4 games. Coming straight from the incomprehensible mind of Hideo Kojima, P.T. Took the world by storm when it came out as a free-to-play demo. A glimpse of what was to come, the story of this game and its demo has to go down in history as one of the saddest, seeing as it was canceled inexplicably by Konami. Soon after, bad blood between Kojima and Konami made the two part ways, and Konami ended up pulling the playable trailer from the digital store, despite its free-to-play status.
P.T. Now remains only in the hard drives of the PS4 owners who never deleted it after downloading it, and getting it any other way through existing licenses is no less a feat than walking down the hallway of the basement of the game itself.