Nobody Noticed Tearaway's Servers Dying for a Month

A month ago, Media Molecule published a notice on its website that Tearaway.me, the online companion hub for both Tearaway and Tearaway Unfolded, would be permanently shut down on August 13, 2026. Nobody said a word. No Reddit threads, no tweets, no coverage. It took a ResetEra user stumbling across the post this week for anyone to realise it had even been announced.

That's a pretty grim illustration of how quickly beloved games disappear from public consciousness. Tearaway launched on PS Vita in 2013, and its PS4 remake Tearaway Unfolded followed in 2015. Both were single-player games, but Tearaway.me let players create profiles, upload photos, share papercrafts, and connect around a game that was, at the time, one of the most charming things Sony had published. Once the hub goes dark, uploaded photos and online profiles will be gone for good, so if you have anything saved there, now is the time to grab it. Media Molecule says papercrafts will still be accessible through its own site.

The games themselves will keep working. You can still play through both and earn trophies, though Media Molecule has listed specific points in each game where error messages will pop up once the online connection is gone. Nothing that blocks progress, just reminders that a piece of the experience has been quietly removed.

I think what sticks with me here isn't the shutdown itself. Online services for decade-old niche titles don't last forever, and nobody expects them to. It's the silence. A studio posts an end-of-life notice for two games that were critically loved, and it sits there unread for a full month. Tearaway was a PS Vita showcase title. It won BAFTAs. And its farewell didn't even register.

This is happening alongside a broader wave of online service retirements. Delisted Games spotted EA announcing that Grid Legends will lose online services on PlayStation and Xbox on September 11, while 2K confirmed TopSpin 2K25's servers will shut down on December 31, 2027, a year later than originally planned. Both publishers cited dwindling player counts making continued support commercially unfeasible. At least those announcements got noticed the same week they were posted.