Destruction AllStars

» see playstation.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

A seventy-dollar price tag was the original plan. Sony announced Destruction AllStars in June 2020 as a full-price PlayStation 5 launch title, pulled it out of the November launch window, cut it to twenty dollars, and then handed it to every PS Plus subscriber free for its first two months. Each of those decisions was announced separately over eight months. The game that finally shipped on 2 February 2021 was an arena where you drove a car into other cars until it fell apart, then climbed out and ran around on foot looking for another one.

The PS Plus giveaway was the sensible answer to a real problem. The PlayStation 5 had been on sale for twelve weeks and was impossible to find at list price, so a paid launch exclusive was going on sale to people who, in large part, had no console to run it on. Giving it away filled the lobbies on day one. It also fixed the price of the game at zero in everybody's head, and when the twenty-dollar version arrived on 6 April 2021 the people who had played it free had already moved on.

Turkey got the giveaway on the same day as everywhere else, because PS Plus is global and a download does not care where you are. Hardware is where the geography shows up. PS5 stock in Turkey in early 2021 carried an import markup on top of a scalper markup, which meant the free game sat in accounts for months before the console to run it on existed in the house. Launches work like that here every generation, so this one's launch-window failures arrive in front of me as shutdown notices rather than as anything I played.

Reviews landed at 62 on Metacritic. The driving model got real credit and the car-to-car damage worked. The complaints were about how little there was to do, and how much of what existed sat behind microtransactions. By May 2021, three months after launch, Lucid Games was filling matches with bots to keep the queue times short enough to be bearable.

~ the dossier ~

~ the empty arenas ~

Lucid kept working on it for over a year, through seasons and new modes. None of it moved the player count. A vehicular brawler needs a full arena to feel like anything, and there were not enough people left to fill one.

Online play had been effectively broken since 2024, well before anyone announced anything. Sony's eventual notice did not describe a decision to end the game so much as a decision to stop pretending it was running: multiplayer services "shall remain offline and are no longer available", written in the present tense, because they already were.

~ the two cutoffs ~

The notice carries two dates. From 26 May 2026 at 14:00 UTC the game and its Destruction Points currency were pulled from sale and the multiplayer was declared permanently offline. A second line gives existing owners until Wednesday 25 November 2026 at 15:00 UTC, when all server support shuts down and any currency still sitting in an account stops being spendable in the single-player modes.

So the game died in May and the servers die in November, with a six-month window where an owner could still boot an arcade mode against bots and burn off coins bought years earlier. Sony published that second timestamp to the minute for a product whose online component nobody could reach.

~ where lucid went ~

Lucid Games in Liverpool was built out of former Bizarre Creations staff, the studio behind Project Gotham Racing and Geometry Wars. Destruction AllStars was its first large original title with a platform holder paying for it. In July 2023 LightSpeed Studios, a Tencent subsidiary, acquired Lucid outright, and the studio carried on with contract work on games including Star Wars Jedi: Survivor and Sea of Thieves.

What is left of the game is a line item on Sony's game-server support page: a product name followed by two timestamps, filed in alphabetical order among the other notices.

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