At the end of March, Sony announced the PlayStation 3, PS Vita, and PSP Stores would close in the summer, causing widespread outcry. Sony appears to have listened to the concerns of customers and developers and has now announced the PS3 and Vita stores will no longer close. The PSP store will still close as planned on July 2, however.
The closure of the three stores would have seen the disappearance of more than 2000 digital exclusive games among the three platforms, and that didn’t count any of the PS Vita games due to be released over the coming months. A statement from Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO Jim Ryan admitted the company had made “the wrong decision” and would no longer be closing the two stores, so the vast majority of those games will now be saved. The full statement reads:
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.
Following the announcement of the closure, several PS Vita developers decided to cancel some of their games because they wouldn’t have been able to release them before the stores closed. Whether those games will now see the light of day again remains to be seen. At least titles like Scourgebringer will be available on the Vita for more than 128 days now.
[Source: PlayStation Blog]
