Sony has announced that Destruction AllStars – the PS5 launch-window vehicular combat game from developer Lucid Games – will be permanently shut down later this year, as reported by Kotaku. Virtual currency sales stopped on May 26, 2026, with single-player modes following on November 25, 2026 at 15:00 UTC – and multiplayer services have already been taken offline ahead of that date. Five years after it launched as one of PlayStation’s flagship next-gen exclusives, the game is going dark with almost nothing to show for it.
Here’s the context: Destruction AllStars had one of the stranger launch trajectories of the PS5 era. It was originally announced as a $70 launch title alongside the console in November 2020, only to be delayed to February 2021 and repriced down to $20 – with PlayStation Plus subscribers getting it free for the first two months, a model Sony had leaned on successfully with Rocket League and Fall Guys. The PS Plus boost didn’t stick: by May 2021, just three months after launch, matches were already being filled with online bots. Lucid Games – founded in 2011 by former Bizarre Creations veterans with deep vehicular combat experience from Project Gotham Racing and Blur – delivered over a year of substantive content updates, but the player base never recovered. The studio was later attached to a Twisted Metal reboot that was subsequently taken away from them and eventually cancelled anyway; Lucid has since been acquired by Tencent subsidiary Lightspeed Studios. The shutdown arrives as Sony’s live-service strategy continues to struggle across the board, with Concord already shut down and Bungie‘s Marathon still failing to build meaningful momentum.
Honestly, “ongoing technical issues” is doing a lot of heavy lifting as the stated reason for multiplayer already being offline before the formal shutdown even begins – that’s not a technical problem, that’s an abandoned game with the paperwork still pending. What the full timeline really shows is a Sony live-service playbook that relied on the PS Plus firehose to inflate early numbers, mistook a free-game download spike for genuine audience interest, and then quietly walked away when retention collapsed. Destruction AllStars wasn’t an outlier – it was the template. Concord followed the same arc at far greater cost, and PS5’s own activity data has consistently exposed how poorly Sony’s live-service titles hold players past their launch windows. Director Colin Berry was candid at launch about the challenge of selling a game with no clear genre reference point, but the harder truth is that no amount of post-launch patching rescues a live-service title that never built a core community in its first month.
What remains unclear is whether Sony will offer any compensation to players sitting on unspent Destruction Points – the official line rules out refunds, telling remaining players to spend their currency before November 25 – and what the Lucid Games acquisition by Lightspeed Studios means for the studio’s future projects under Tencent‘s umbrella. It’s also worth watching whether Sony‘s remaining live-service pipeline faces further quiet cancellations heading into 2027, particularly as Bungie‘s strategic role inside PlayStation Studios comes under renewed scrutiny.
Did Destruction AllStars ever win you over during its PS Plus window, or was it always a game that felt like it was missing a reason to exist? And does Sony‘s pattern of live-service failures change how excited you are for whatever comes next from PlayStation? Sound off in the comments below, and keep your eyes on GameLuster for more live-service and PlayStation coverage.
