PS Plus adds Avatar and Rise of the Ronin, quietly drops eight games

Sony announced its July PlayStation Plus Game Catalog lineup on Tuesday: nine games, led by Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora and Rise of the Ronin. The post, from Adam Michel, Sony’s director of content acquisition and operations, does not mention the eight games leaving the service on July 21 — the same day four of the nine new arrivals land.

The subtraction isn’t hidden, exactly. It lives in the PlayStation Store’s “Last chance to play” tab, where ScreenRant and Game Rant spotted a twelve-game departure list back in mid-June. Sony has since reshuffled it. As PlayStation LifeStyle reported on June 25, the July 21 batch now runs eight games: Risk of Rain 2, Tropico 6, Get Even, Cursed to Golf, Hundred Days: Winemaking Simulator, Infinite Minigolf, Source of Madness, and a late addition, The Jackbox Party Pack 9. Five titles from the original list (Röki, Clash: Artifacts of Chaos, Onee Chanbara Origin, Space Crew: Legendary Edition, and Bomber Crew) got a reprieve until August 18. None of it appears anywhere in the announcement that shaped this week’s coverage.

So here’s the arithmetic the blog post skips: nine in, eight out, five more exits already booked for August.

The arrivals are staggered. Rise of the Ronin, Team Ninja’s open-world action RPG, hit the Extra tier July 15 in the US and UK, July 16 in Japan. Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora and Firefighting Simulator: Ignite follow on July 21, alongside two Premium-only classics. Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: Rita’s Rewind, Dying Light, Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector, and Snow Bros. Wonderland close it out July 28.

The departures all go at once. After July 21, a downloaded copy of Risk of Rain 2 stops launching unless you buy it. Same for Tropico 6 and the other six. Risk of Rain 2 is probably the sharpest loss in the batch; plenty of subscribers have hundreds of hours in it. None of that is a scandal. It’s the deal: subscription catalogs are rental shelves, and rental shelves rotate. The part that edges toward scandal is that Sony’s announcements only ever describe the shelf filling up.

Which brings us to the strangest name in the July list, and the reason the rotation is worth a second look: Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy, arriving on the Premium tier July 21.

Psi-Ops was Midway’s June 2004 psychic-powers shooter, a cult favorite for its physics-driven telekinesis combat. Critics liked it (an 84 on Metacritic across 46 reviews, per Tech Times), but it sold poorly, the sequel was shelved, and when Midway collapsed into bankruptcy in 2009 the rights went to Warner Bros. along with hundreds of other Midway properties. Its last notable official distribution was a free, ad-supported PC download on FilePlanet in 2008. Since then the PC version has drifted into abandonware territory: a well-reviewed game nobody could legally sell you.

Now Nick Scryer is back, twenty-two years later. Sony flagged the return at an earlier State of Play, per GamingBible, inviting players to “wield psychic powers as elite agent Nick Scryer and unravel a shadowy conspiracy,” in the blog post’s words.

That’s genuinely good news for anyone who cares about the game. It is not preservation. Nobody is selling you a copy to keep; Psi-Ops comes back as a catalog entry, on a service that is removing eight catalog entries the day it arrives. Whatever combination of Sony’s classics program and Warner’s licensing made this resurrection possible can un-make it on the same terms, and neither company has said how long the arrangement runs.

Our read: a game that spent two decades in rights limbo just resurfaced on a shelf with a built-in trapdoor. The “Last chance to play” tab updates every month. Eventually Psi-Ops will be in it.