PlayStation Is Surprisingly Shutting Down One of Its Own First-Party PS5 Games

As of this week, PlayStation revealed that it is going to be shutting down the servers for Firewall Ultra in September. Released in 2023, Firewall Ultra was a multiplayer shooter that was designed specifically for PlayStation VR2 headsets on PS5. Its predecessor, Firewall: Zero Hour, ended up being hugely successful on the original PlayStation VR for PS4, which led to PlayStation greenlighting a sequel at developer First Contact Entertainment. Unfortunately, Firewall Ultra wasn’t able to garner the same success, which led to First Contact as a whole shutting its doors at the end of 2023.

While Firewall Ultra has remained playable in the wake of First Contact’s closure, that won’t hold true for much longer. Specifically, Firewall Ultra will go offline for good on September 17th, with the game having already been delisted on the PS Store to prevent new purchases. Strangely, rather than announce this news to PlayStation fans in a direct manner, Sony simply went back to a PS Blog post from nearly three years ago and shared the details of this shutdown.

This Move Represents One of PlayStation’s Biggest Failures of the PS5 Generation

Firewall Ultra is merely the latest example of just how big of a failure PlayStation VR2 has been for PlayStation in this generation. PlayStation was never able to come close to replicating the success of the original PSVR, likely due to consumer fatigue with the technology and the high price point of the PSVR2. It can also be argued that PlayStation itself didn’t invest heavily enough in games for PSVR2, as Firewall Ultra was the only game published by PlayStation on the platform outside of Horizon: Call of the Mountain.