After PlayStation fans have suffered a season of disheartening moves — with the final nail scheduled to close the PlayStation Store for older consoles — Sony has seemingly heard our cries (or at least seen the ledger turn black) and postponed most of the dire news. In a PlayStation Blog post this afternoon, President & CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment, Jim Ryan, announced that their decision might have been a little too hasty.
Recently, we notified players that PlayStation Store for PS3 and PS Vita devices was planned to end this summer.
Upon further reflection, however, it’s clear that we made the wrong decision here. So today I’m happy to say that we will be keeping the PlayStation Store operational for PS3 and PS Vita devices. PSP commerce functionality will retire on July 2, 2021 as planned.
When we initially came to the decision to end purchasing support for PS3 and PS Vita, it was born out of a number of factors, including commerce support challenges for older devices and the ability for us to focus more of our resources on newer devices where a majority of our gamers are playing on. We see now that many of you are incredibly passionate about being able to continue purchasing classic games on PS3 and PS Vita for the foreseeable future, so I’m glad we were able to find a solution to continue operations.
I’m glad that we can keep this piece of our history alive for gamers to enjoy, while we continue to create cutting-edge new game worlds for PS4, PS5, and the next generation of VR.
Thank you for sharing your feedback with us – we’re always listening and appreciate the support from our PlayStation community.
It’s truly great news but I, for one, will still treat it as living on borrowed time. The store was always going to be shut down at some point, and now that it very nearly did I can’t trust Sony to keep it operational for more than a year or two. The “foreseeable future” is not much of a promise and we’ve seen that term from other delisted games turn out to be as short as six months. Granted, Sony would face an even bigger blowback if they were to turn around and re-announce the store closures too soon. Personally speaking though, they’ve shaken my faith for the foreseeable future of the current regime in charge.
There are also some unanswered questions like what happens to PlayStation minis? They were initially playable on PSP, and some are still exclusive to the handheld, so will we lose all of those after July 2nd or just some of them? While Ryan was quick to make a statement today, the support team has yet to update the Important Notice page with any changes. Hopefully we’ll find out a little more soon.
GIVEAWAY UPDATE: Yes, I’m still going to do the giveaways for May and June. It just might have a different theme now that things aren’t quite so dire. So stay tuned to the giveaway page, the big $50 Twitch stream is still planned for the week of May 9th!