Sony Delists Three PS5 Classic Games After Store Pricing Slip

If you went looking for a few older first-party PlayStation titles this week and came up empty, your eyes aren't playing tricks on you. The latest batch of delisted PS5 games includes Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection, Knack II, and God of War III Remastered, and all three were confirmed missing from the PlayStation Store at the time of writing.

That's odd, because these aren't forgotten releases. They're current games people could still reasonably want to buy, and there's no obvious reason they'd be gone. Start with Uncharted. The series isn't dominating conversation right now, mostly because Naughty Dog moved on to The Last of Us after Uncharted 4 and is currently busy with Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet.

Even so, Nathan Drake had a movie only a couple of years ago, so the character still carries real weight. The Nathan Drake Collection is also the only way to play the original three Uncharted games on a PS5. If you want to work up to Uncharted 4: A Thief's End or Uncharted: The Lost Legacy.

Whether through the remastered versions or the original PS4 releases, that bundle is where you'd begin.

Losing access to it matters more than it looks at first glance, and it adds to the growing pile of delisted PS5 games players have to worry about. Hardly anyone will be upset about Knack II. It's long been treated as a meme game, and Mark Cerny started it to show what voxels could do on the PS4.

The first game was a third-person action-adventure title in the vein of Banjo-Kazooie, and it mostly served to fill out the console's launch lineup. It was never a big seller. It's the kind of game people mention more as a joke than as a recommendation. People used to joke about how excited they were to play Knack, even though nobody really remembers feeling that way back then, which makes it a little strange that the series got a sequel at all.

God of War III Remastered is the strangest name among the delisted PS5 games. Sony has been working to bring Kratos's Greek era back into focus, and the series also has God of War: Sons of Sparta and God of War Ragnarök, which mash together different mythologies. With all that going on, you'd expect the classic game, the one that was ported to the PS4 and then upscaled for the PS5, to stay on sale for anyone who wants to buy it.

Once you dig into it, the reason makes sense. On the Mexican PlayStation Store, all three games dropped to 50 cents, which clearly wasn't supposed to happen. Sony apparently tried to fix the price error and couldn't do it quickly enough. There were other ways to handle it.

Sony could have honored the 50-cent sales, but chose to pull the games instead.

The company could have let people buy the games at that price and then removed them from their libraries, or it could have decided that the number of people grabbing the Uncharted bundle or the Knack sequel for 50 cents was small enough to just honor. Neither of those options was taken.

Instead, it pulled the games from the North American PlayStation Store and left it there. The assumption is they'll go back on sale once they fix the price error. Until then, this is one more entry in the list of delisted PS5 games with no clear return date.

That said, nothing guarantees a comeback, and that's the frustrating part. Plenty of people who wanted these games have probably already bought them, especially the Knack sequel. Nobody wakes up on October 14 with great releases like Valor Mortis, Silent Hill: Townfall, and Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival waiting for them and decides they really need to play Knack II but never got around to buying it.

The overlap between people who want to play that game today and people who don't already own it is basically a perfect circle, so if it ended up staying among the delisted PS5 games, it wouldn't be a big deal. That's what makes God of War III Remastered a tougher loss. It's a great game, and while it might not be underplayed, it sold well.

Its loss hurts most because it’s the last classic-style God of War on PS5.

After that, the series moved to an over-the-shoulder camera with 2018's God of War, making this the last playable entry on PS5 that feels like the God of War longtime fans grew up with. That's why the remaster still matters even though newer entries have taken over the series. If it never came back, that would be a real disappointment.

Anyone who already owns any of these delisted PS5 games can still play them, which means you can go back to the Uncharted games whenever you like if you bought them earlier. Still, not being able to buy them is a letdown. If gameplay for the Greek God of War remake gets shown off, plenty of people will want to go pick up the older entries first. The same applies to Uncharted.

If the rumors about the series returning are true, The Nathan Drake Collection should be in the store so people can catch up on why Nathan Drake is arguably Sony's best first-party character. Having the older games available would give any new reveal a bigger audience. It's hard to defend the fact that new Uncharted games aren't arriving every couple of years.

Delistings carry more weight when you consider the company's plan to move away from physical games. If a game is pulled after 2028, it's gone for good, since there's no disc version and you can't go back to the original 1.0 release. You're stuck with whichever version was live right before the removal.

There's also no reassurance these games are available elsewhere, since the company is pulling back on single-player first-party releases on Steam and other PC storefronts. That makes it a safe guess that The Nathan Drake Collection will never reach PC, and that any title's availability and playability drop sharply once it joins the ranks of delisted PS5 games.

In other words, once a digital-only game leaves the store, getting it back becomes much harder.

Emulation gets mentioned as a safety net, and PS5 games can technically be emulated now, though not well, and it's likely to improve. That's a positive, but it doesn't really solve the issue of delisted PS5 games. Anyone who has tried downloading ROMs of newer console games, such as Switch titles, has probably watched viruses infect their computer in real time, so it isn't a fix anyone should lean on.

Anyone hoping to get around the problem that way is taking a real risk with their machine. It's easy to see why players are stressed about delisted PS5 games, but everything suggests these three will return. If you planned to play any of them, hopefully you already have them in your account.

The expectation is that they'll come back, but with this company's online infrastructure, you never really know, and there has been no official comment. For now, everyone is left waiting to see whether these delisted PS5 games are permanently gone or whether the company is actually working on the price error.

Given how the company operates these days, it could look at how the games were selling and decide the balance sheet doesn't justify spending money to fix a mistake that dropped them to 50 cents. If sales are low, they could simply stay off the PlayStation Store, and that would be the end of it. The company hasn't said which way it's leaning, so checking the store from time to time is the only option.

Whichever way it plays out, the episode shows how fragile access to older digital games can be. A pricing slip in one regional store was enough to take three well-known releases off sale in North America, leaving out the players who never picked them up. For now, anyone with these games already in their library is fine, and everyone else has to hope they come back to the store.