Topic: PS4 Physical games missing from played lists (and potentially more)

I've brought this up in the 'Chit Chat' thread but thought it worth highlighting more to see how many others are affected by this.

The issue seemed to stem from when people started to get random games they had not played appearing in their lists, as noted by this Push Square article

https://www.pushsquare.com/news/2026/06/ps5s-recently-played-...

However, when this was deemed fixed I suddenly noticed The Witcher 3 missing from my most played list. I am currently replaying on PS5 and that is showing/tracking fine but the PS4 version is gone.

I've come to realise a lot of games I have played form physical PS4 disc are all no longer tracked. All trophies are still fine but the system will not register I have played certain games. I even tested replaying one of these PS4 games, and while the app would show it while it was playing, as soon as I stopped it would not show as recently played.

I've now checked all my physical games and discovered the following list of games are all gone

The Witcher 3
Read Dead Redemption
Mass Effect Legendary Edition
Mass Effect Andromeda
Tomb Raider Definitive Edition
Rise of the Tomb Raider
Fallout 4
Spider-Man
Infamous Second Son
No Mans Sky
Steep (but does show I played demo)
The Olympic Games Tokyo 2020
GT Sport (again shows only demo)
MGS Ground Zeroes
Death Stranding
Horizon Zero Dawn
Uncharted Lost Legacy
Alien Isolation
The Order 1886
Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order
South Park Fractured but Whole
AC Unity
AC Syndicate
The Last Guardian
Yakuza Zero
The Wolf Among Us
Concrete Genie
Call of Duty Infinite Warfare

I also found one PS5 disc game missing

Guardians of the Galaxy

because I reversed the sleeve on it and forgot it was a PS5 disc.

It's not all my physical PS4 games though as just as many are still showing just fine.

If anyone else owns these games physically maybe you could check to see if they show for you.

My most recently played games are all ps5 discs - ghost of yotei, 007, gran turismo 7. None of them show any longer in the recently played list

@MatthewJP Unfortunately I don't have those games to compare (but I do want to get two of them at some point).

Hopefully others can check if they do.

@BearsEatBeets Thanks for making a separate topic about this. I haven't done a comprehensive check of my own profile, but I did notice a wide range of games are definitely missing. As others have noted, it's not just PS4 games or physical discs, or games without DLC or anything.

Two of my examples are Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales and Naruto X Boruto Ultimate Ninja Storm Connections. Both are PS5 games I played via physical discs, but the latter has DLC, some of which I have purchased and installed, making the "no DLC" criteria irrelevant. I think it's just totally random, and that a majority of the games affected just happen to be physical PS4 games.

One other thing that might be of interest, a couple years back the PS4 updated its privacy settings and since I have everything set to maximum privacy, anything I play on PS4 doesn't appear listed on my profile. My friends still get to see "currently playing [insert PS4 game here]" alongside my username, my trophies work as you'd expect 'em to, and even my PS4's Recent Activity tab fills up whenever I earn a PS4 game's trophy (regardless of what console I earned it on) but if I were to go play something on my PS4 right now, it wouldn't show up on either of my profile pages. Been that way for a long while now.

@Werehog cheers, I was hoping to get more eyes on it to try and figure it out. We even got a new article not long after but unfortunately the framing of it alongside current news meant most of the comments went off on tangents.

You're right I've seen enough info to know it's not a set of specific games being affected but some random combination of factors.

That's an interesting thought about privacy settings. I did a while back tweak mine to be a bit more private but realised it made my profile stop working on PSN Profiles so I put it back for that one thing. I can't remember exactly when I last used my PS4 but it feels like it has been quite a long time, probably not at all this year.

The strangest part for me is I can play one the games affected and if I check the app it shows being played. As soon as I stop though the system has forgotten it again as if something is preventing it from registering.

Fingers crossed it is being worked on and can be resolved.

I did not do a thorough check but I did play a couple PS5 discs this weekend which did not show up on my recently played list — Saros and GT7. I’m playing HFW from disc and it’s registering fine and my playtime continues to be updated as I’ve played.

Weird. It makes no sense.

@Th3solution yeah I've given up now trying to figure out what causes some but not others to be affected. It would just be nice to know for sure if they are going to fix it properly.

@BearsEatBeets I’m not too worried about my playtimes being messed up or my recently played list being incorrect, as long as the trophies don’t get affected. The bigger issue is the concern that the PSN infrastructure is just glitchy and losing things/not tracking things and with the news about all our gaming going digital, it doesn’t generate much confidence in the network.

I have also noted that on my Portal the tab for recently played games via cloud streaming is empty. I have to look up each title by searching when I use it, rather than be able to just click from the recent games list. I thought it was just some little wrinkle from my internet connection being too slow or something, but now I’m pretty sure it all relates to this same issue that’s happening on PS5.

@Th3solution Yes, you're right the thing broken itself isn't very important. I'm a sucker for stats and like seeing my 'End of Year' stuff but it's nothing more than a nice little feature. If it never got fixed it would be nothing more than a shame in and of itself.

Like you mention the big issue is the ramifications as to the stability and safety of their software systems. The fact that this all come about from them trying to fix one problem only to create a much more widespread one.

The amount of time it's been going on for now without being sorted doesn't inspire confidence.

I had suspicion that all the disc-only games are missing—specifically those with no DLC at all, or at least none that I own. I’m starting to suspect that this has nothing to do with the "security issue" from 3 weeks ago (where people had obscene games on their profiles), but rather that the missing disc games are a side effect of the announcement that there won't be any disc-based games after 2028.

Here are some sources on reddit featuring users reporting the issue:

@mrc247 despite affecting mostly physical games I see no reason to connect it to Sony's announcement of stopping future physical games.
The issue started exactly after they tried to correct the unusual games appearing on some peoples profiles. Plus it is only affecting some physical games and not others. Those of us that have discussed this can find no correlation between extra dlc either.

I like to think they will eventually get it fixed.

You might be right; it’s just a suspicion on my part.
I don't expect the problem to be fixed after three weeks. You don't read anything about it in the press—only on Reddit are there hundreds of people reporting it—but no one is actually contacting support. I wouldn't be surprised if Sony isn't even aware of the issue.

@mrc247 They did an article on it here but it kind of got drowned out by the other news. I admit I don't know how aware Sony are of the issue. I'd like to think at least some people have contacted them, plus it being related (I think) to them doing that other fix that they might already know.
My take is that they are just struggling to resolve it while preventing that original problem from reoccurring. The total randomness of what it is affecting (seems slightly different for everyone) is probably why it's tricky to sort.

After reading the article today and the one linked to Pure Xbox, I’m gradually starting to wonder if this issue we’re having with games dropping off our lists relates to the discontinuation of physical media in the sense that Sony have been trying to put together an answer to Xbox’s digitization of physical discs that’s being rolled out soon. Even with Xbox, they say that 360 and prior games won’t be supported for the conversion process due to the way the discs were made, or something like that. Perhaps Sony has been working in the background to create their own digitization system for discs and they’re struggling to get some of them to register as played games for a specific user. It’s still weird that there’s a randomness to it all where it’s mostly PS4 discs but also PS5 disc games and maybe even some digital games too not showing up. It just seems like a fishy coincidence that this would happen at the same time the stoppage of physical was announced and the Xbox disc conversion is all rolling out too.

I fear this may be similar to when Sony struggled to figure out a way for people to change their PSN names. I don’t remember the details, but the way they programmed how your name linked to your account made it very challenging to be able to change it. Microsoft on the other hand had the foresight where the name itself wasn’t linked but rather a unique code was the identifier that was then linked to your name so it made it more easily changeable. Sony eventually figured out a workaround, but it wasn’t perfect and some older titles, leaderboards, and saves were going to have problems if you change your name. I have an inkling that this is similar. It’s possible some discs didn’t have unique identifiers and as they are experimenting with a system to convert them to digital maybe it’s deleted them somehow.

Just my completely uneducated hunch.