Today Sony has walked back their plans to close the PlayStation 3 and Vita stores later this year. In a statement on the PlayStation Blog they say they have realized they have made “The wrong decision here” and will keep the stores in operation. The PSP store however will close as planned.
Here is the full statement from Sony:
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.
My take: This is a temporary solution to an ongoing problem. They have yet to address the PS3’s CMOS battery issues which makes all digital purchases not function until the console is connected to their servers that may or may not be up and running years from now. The PlayStation 4 has this very same issue but it extends to physical media on that device as well.
