Sony’s having a very weird week. For starters, President and CEO Jim Ryan announced his plans to retire after 30 years at the company. Now, in a letter to fans this morning, video game merchandise website Gaming Heads announced that Sony has ordered the destruction of their entire stock of PlayStation collectibles, even those already paid for by customers.

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This letter was posted on Gaming Heads’ official social media accounts as well as directly on their website. The letter reads as follows:

OPEN LETTER TO THE SONY PLAYSTATION COLLECTING COMMUNITY

On this The Last of Us Day, we regret to inform you and the SONY PlayStation collecting community that SONY has told us to destroy all of our SONY PlayStation merchandise, including in-stock items (e.g. The Last of Us Part II: Ellie statues, Jak 3 statues, God of War statues / busts etc.), items ready to ship to you (i.e. the Sly Cooper (Classic edition) statue), items in production (i.e. The Last of Us: Ellie & Joel diorama) and items in development and ready to launch (e.g. Bloodborne and Ratchet & Clank statues). Yes, this also includes destroying items you have paid for and are waiting to ship to you.

All of our other items (i.e. all non SONY PlayStation items) are fine and are not affected by SONY PlayStation’s decision.

We have worked with SONY PlayStation for more than 10 years to bring you some of the best video game collectibles and have been trying hard to get them to change their mind. They know you have paid your hard-earned money for items that are ready to ship to you or that are in production but unfortunately, after doing all that we can, they have told us not to ship your orders to you – “our business priorities remain unchanged” (a recent direct quote from SONY).

Yes, this is SONY PlayStation’s decision, not ours.

Yes, we want to ship your Jak 3, TLOU2 Ellie, TLOU Ellie & Joel, Sly Cooper and Kratos statues/bust to you but SONY PlayStation does not allow it.

Yes, SONY PlayStation has already received royalty payments from you on your orders that SONY PlayStation now wants us to destroy and not ship to you.

We sincerely apologize if you find yourself in this completely avoidable situation, but please contact Judy Ward (Commercial Partnerships | Sony Interactive Entertainment) at Judy.Ward@sony.com about your (now cancelled) order, payments, refunds etc. and what they will do for you. This is the team at SONY PlayStation that requires the destruction of the items you have ordered, paid for and on which SONY PlayStation has already received royalties from you but will now not allow us to ship your orders to you.

Together we made it through Covid lockdowns, factory closures (it effected production of the Sly Cooper statue, the Kratos (Norse) bust and caused countless delays with other statues), and many other challenges but it seems that you cannot change a decision of SONY PlayStation even if the decision may hurt the SONY PlayStation collecting community We remember SONY PlayStation’s old tagline that they are ‘for the Players’ … but given their recent decision that they know adversely affects those in the collecting community willing to spend more on SONY PlayStation merchandise than an actual console, we are now not so sure.

We again sincerely apologize for this extremely disappointing situation but continue to work with our other licensing partners to bring the best video game collectibles to you and to the rest of the collecting community.

Thank you for your continued support.

This is truly a bizarre move from Sony. According to a tweet from Gaming Heads, the only explanation Sony offered was that Gaming Heads and their products were “no longer business priorities.”

they said we/our products were no longer business priorities. As many have already commented … PS could have let those Community member orders be shipped to those who have paid for their items etc. but no.

— Gaming Heads (@GamingHeads) September 27, 2023

Understandably, the staff at Gaming Heads is pretty salty about this. They’re now going to have dozens of refunds to process and a whole heap of collectibles with nowhere to go. This decision seems very out-of-the-blue for Sony, but it’s always hard to say what goes on behind closed doors.

In other Sony news, a hacker group claims to have successfully breached Sony’s data and is auctioning off the information for an exorbitant amount of money. We’ve got an article with all the pertinent information here.

What do you think of Sony’s order of destruction? Let us know.