Tiny indie studio's first game trailer buried in Sony disc protest comments

A launch day surprise nobody wanted

Launching your first game is supposed to feel like a milestone. For Eat Pant Games, a two-person studio based in New Zealand, July 15 was exactly that. Teeto, a colorful 3D platformer about a blob and a bunny racing to stop a shadowy corruption from spreading across their world, hit PS5, Steam, Nintendo Switch, and Switch 2 all at once. Then PlayStation posted the launch trailer to its official YouTube channel, and the comment counter started climbing.

“Me: omg! Our game just launched, and PlayStation posted our launch trailer! 400 comments whaaaaaat! I wonder what people think of our game?” the studio wrote on X. They followed that with a simple, deflated: “Oh… oh no.”

The comments weren’t about Teeto. Not really. They were about discs.

Caught in a much bigger fight

Sony had recently announced it would end physical PlayStation releases, a decision that lit up gaming forums and social feeds with frustration. When Teeto’s trailer landed on PlayStation’s channel, it became an accidental bulletin board for that grievance. Phrases like “We want discs,” “Keep making discs Sony,” and “You’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy” filled the section, according to reporting by Dexerto. By July 18, the video had accumulated more than 600 comments, with very few touching on the actual game.

None of that anger originated with Eat Pant Games. The studio had nothing to do with Sony’s policy. It simply released its first game on a platform that happened to be at the center of a culture war about physical media ownership.

The awkward timing is genuinely hard to overstate. Teeto launched to 100% positive reviews from its first 25 players on Steam, according to Dexerto. The people who found the game through normal channels seemed to like it. The hundreds of people who found the trailer through PlayStation’s channel had something else entirely on their minds.

”We’ve literally had people tell us to CANCEL our digital release”

The situation moved from unfortunate to actively hostile when some users turned their frustration directly on the developers. Eat Pant Games revealed that commenters had demanded the studio scrap its digital launch altogether and release Teeto in physical form only.

“We’ve literally had people tell us to CANCEL our digital release and do physical only,” the team wrote, as reported by Dexerto.

The studio pushed back with patience that, honestly, most people probably couldn’t have managed. They noted, clearly, that they are two people. That Teeto is their first game. That they support physical ownership in principle and would genuinely love to put Teeto on a disc someday. But they also spelled out the reality of physical publishing for a tiny first-time studio: the upfront costs and financial risk are enormous. For a two-person team shipping their debut title, digital distribution isn’t an ideological stance against ownership. It’s how the math works.

The collateral damage of a platform war

What happened to Eat Pant Games illustrates something that tends to get lost when large-scale consumer protests take shape online. The anger may be aimed at a corporation, but it travels indiscriminately. PlayStation’s YouTube channel publishes trailers for massive first-party blockbusters and tiny third-party debuts without much distinction, and commenters flooding that space don’t always stop to check who actually made what they’re yelling beneath.

Small studios don’t have community managers standing by to weather these moments. They are, often literally, two people checking their phones on launch day and hoping people talk about their game.

Teeto is still out there, still sitting at a perfect review score from the players who found it. That’s the part worth holding onto here.