Last week, The Gamer reported that Sony would soon be closing its PS3 and PSP digital stores, with the Vita store following a few months later. At the time, it was listed as a rumor, though the site said Sony should make the official announcement before the end of March. This bore out today as Sony has confirmed that the older digital stores will close this summer.
“We are closing PlayStationStore on PlayStation®3 consoles on 2nd July 2021 and on PlayStation Vita devices on 27th August 2021,” Sony put on their website today. “Additionally, the remaining purchase functionality for PSP (PlayStation Portable) will also retire on 2nd July 2021.”
What does this mean for you? Well, if you own any of those consoles, you only have about three months and some change to make purchases on them. After that, anything you bought from 2006 on will be available for you to redownload as long as the servers remain up. If you’re looking to play an old PS1 game on your Vita you never purchased, though, you’re out of luck.
Games that are on discs or carts will obviously still work, but there’s a number of digital-only titles that will simply never be purchasable again. Kenneth Shepard made the argument here that shutting down the stores makes all-digital futures look quite a bit less rosy and, while I may never seek out Pain to replay, the fact that I can’t is a bit of a problem.
