A PS5 Exclusive Stops Working Forever Today: Firewall Ultra Goes Offline at 10am PDT

Firewall Ultra stops working today. Not "loses matchmaking" — stops working.

Sony is ending the game's online services on 17 September 2026 at 10:00am PDT, and because the game requires a connection to function at all, that is the end of it. It is already delisted and can no longer be bought.

What you lose

Firewall Ultra was a PSVR2-exclusive tactical shooter, released in August 2023 by First Contact Entertainment. There is no offline mode and no private-server option. It does have a PvE mode against computer-controlled opponents — but that is tied to the same online infrastructure, so it goes too. After 10am Pacific, an owned copy is an icon.

The developer cannot patch in a fallback, either. First Contact Entertainment announced its closure at the end of 2023, citing that the lack of support for VR within the industry had "eventually taken its toll."

How Sony announced it

Not with a post. Sony disclosed the shutdown by editing a PlayStation Blog entry from 22 August 2023 — a piece originally written about the game's post-launch content roadmap — and adding the end-of-service notice to it.

A three-year-old roadmap post is not somewhere anyone checks for news. It is a technically-published announcement that almost nobody would see, for a game people paid for.

Coverage of the shutdown does not mention any refund programme. If you want one, the PlayStation Store refund process is the only route, and it is not designed for this situation.

Why it matters beyond one game

This is the clean version of a problem the industry keeps producing: a game that was only ever a service, sold as a product, outliving the company that made it by three years and then disappearing on a schedule nobody who bought it agreed to.

It is also a useful thing to hold in mind while the physical-media conversation runs. A disc does not save an always-online game — Firewall Ultra would be equally dead on a Blu-ray. The question is not what the game shipped on, it is whether the game can run without permission from a server. Increasingly, the answer is no.

PSVR2 owners have relatively few tentpole shooters to begin with. Losing one permanently, with its studio already gone, narrows a library that was not wide.