STONKS-9800 Loses PlayStation Release After Sony Cuts Ties
A cult stock market sim just lost its PlayStation release, and the guy who made it still has no idea why.
STONKS-9800 drops you into 1980s Japan at the peak of the bubble economy, and it was supposed to land on PS4 and PS5. That's off. On Sunday, TERNOX, a studio that is really one developer working out of Ukraine, posted on X that Sony had unilaterally terminated his developer and publisher agreement. No reason given, no warning, and no reply to the emails he sent afterwards.
It's not one game, it's thirteen
The cancellation is the small part. Losing that agreement means losing the shelf: all thirteen of the studio's previously released games are due to come off the PlayStation Store within days. What happens to people who already bought them? Nobody has said. Sony hasn't commented at all, and the developer keeps insisting he broke no rules.
There is a backup plan, and it's a modest one. STONKS-9800 goes to Xbox and Switch instead, self-published, with physical editions planned for those two machines only. PlayStation is off the roadmap for good.
The PS Store cleanup, and what it may have caught
Context matters here. Sony has spent months shovelling junk off its own storefront: roughly 1,200 listings vanished in January, several hundred more went at the end of March, mostly entire catalogues from publishers who churn out filler. A lot of that stuff was assembled with generative AI and existed mainly to sell easy trophies. Almost nobody mourned it.
Push Square points at the other side of that operation. Sift with a net that wide and sooner or later you catch somebody who did nothing wrong. I want to be clear that this is a theory and not a confirmed fact, because nobody has produced anything tying the terminated contract to the purge, and Sony is saying nothing.
So what is this game, anyway?
Far better than the meme name suggests. It has been in Early Access on Steam since 17 July 2023 with Overwhelmingly Positive reviews, 97% out of nearly 1,400 of them. You play a Japanese trader riding the bubble, buying stocks, collecting dividends, moving into property, messing about with pachinko and horse racing, and watching your own health so the job doesn't put you in hospital.
Nothing changes on PC. STONKS-9800 is still on Steam, as is the older Taimumari 2 from the same developer. One platform simply dropped off the list.
This stopped being about a niche stock trading game a while ago. It's about a storefront being able to wipe out a decade of someone's work with a single email, or rather with the absence of one. Do you think Sony will ever explain itself? Let us know in the comments.