- Sony has officially announced the end of the PS Store support for PS3, PSP, and PS Vita.
- Users of these devices will still be able to access and download the content they’ve purchased.
- Starting from this summer, the purchase functionality will be closed, so no new titles can be added.
Sony is pulling the PlayStation Store plug for PlayStation 3 consoles and PlayStation Portable devices on July 2, 2021, while the end of the Store’s support for PlayStation Vita will come a little bit later, on August 27, 2021. The PS Store is a digital media store available through the PlayStation Network, so it’s essentially a place to buy games or downloadable content, keep digital copies stored on the cloud, and access them at any time.
According to Sony’s announcement, whatever game titles people purchased from the store in the past will still be accessible or downloadable, and that also includes video and media content. Also, if you have any left-over vouchers, you will still be able to redeem them. What you will no longer be able to do is purchase anything new, make in-game purchases in the games you play, and redeem PSN wallet fund vouchers and gift cards. So, the purchase functionality on these devices will be permanently closed after the given dates.
If that is upsetting or even frustrating to you, we should point out that Sony is abandoning platforms that are pretty irrelevant today. PlayStation 3 was released in 2006, so it has already enjoyed a whopping 15 years of support. The PSP is an even older device, released in 2004, while the Vita came to the world in 2011. So, all in all, these are pretty old gaming consoles that shouldn’t be in the hands of a noteworthy number of people today.
Even if you’re still rocking a PSP or PS Vita, you are still able to download all the content you own by accessing the “Download List” on your device. And if you want to play a title that you kept postponing before, you still have a couple of months left to do it and keep it forever.
All the focus and resources will now pass to PS4 and PS5, but as we discussed recently, Sony’s previous-gen console could be ditched too, as soon as a significant portion of the userbase migrates/upgrades to PS5. The first feature that Sony announced they’d be scrapping from PS4 in April 2021 is the “PS Communities.” For sure, though, we wouldn’t expect that to happen before 2023, a full decade after the PS4 launch – so until then, Sony should continue to support it.
