Starting today, September 3rd, 2019, the multiplayer servers for PS3 games Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception and The Last of Us are shutting down. After today you won’t be able to play these games on the PlayStation Network if you have a PS3.

The news comes courtesy of Push Square, who sent out the reminder just before the games had their servers shut down.

The original announcement actually came back around the time of E3 this year in June, where not only did Sony forfeit to host a stage conference but they also had no new announcements for… well, anything.

The shut down of the multiplayer servers for the two Uncharted games and The Last of Us also comes after Sony announced that Driveclub would be delisted from the PlayStation Store in 2020.

This has always been the major worry of most gamers when it comes to digital distribution. You have no ownership rights, and when the corporation decides to cut off the game’s service… well that’s it. It’s finito, it’s done, it’s gone.

In this case, since the PlayStation ecosystem is a walled garden it means that there’s nothing you can do about the multiplayer being shutdown for Naughty Dog’s games.

The only way to bring the multiplayer back would be to try to spoof the PlayStation Network and attempt to use a dedicated server for multiplayer gaming via emulation and some spiffy hacking. It would take a lot of work and a heck of a lot of time, but it might be possible. We’ve seen a number of MMOs brought back this way, but those were native to PC; trying to do the same thing by deconstructing the files, working through the encryption, and trying to get things working right through a PS3 emulator is a whole other can of worms.

Anyway, this is just another case of the all-digital future looking less and less accommodating to gamers by the day.

(Thanks for the news tip Hot Katsuragi)