Sony Will No Longer Shut Down PS3 and PS Vita Online Stores This July

Due to community feedback, Sony just took a U-turn in their decision to shut down the PlayStation stores for PS3 and Vita as they just announced today that they will continue supporting the two platforms.

In a blog post by Sony, president and CEO Jim Ryan says that “it’s clear that we made the wrong decision here.”

“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.”

The public outcry was heard and the many titles available on the PS3 and PS Vita PlayStation Stores will remain available, but sadly not for PSP devices as it’s PlayStation Store will still shut down on July 2, 2021.

What does that mean for PSP owners? - you will no longer purchase any content digitally for that platform. But your collection of digital games are still intact as you can still re-download any previously purchased games or media onto your PSP device.

The announcement to kill the online stores for the PS3, PS Vita, and PSP was revealed rather quietly to the public a few weeks ago with not much of a big announcement from Sony. This led to various concerns from consumers and developers as there are certain games that will be no longer available once the PlayStation Store goes offline. It also doesn’t help that the current gen console, the PlayStation 5, is only backwards compatible with most of PlayStation 4’s library of games.

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