Sony has decided to leave the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita stores up after catching a lot of flak in the last month for making the terrible decision to stop supporting them. That’s really the only reason why. Keep bullying corporations, y’all.
In an update on the PlayStation Blog, the CEO and President of Sony Interactive Jim Ryan himself wrote, “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.”
Ryan cites “a number of factors, including commerce support challenges for older devices” as part of the reasoning behind closing the stores down in the first place. As he notes though, “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.”
While the PS3 and PS Vita stores will remain open “for the foreseeable future,” Ryan does say that “PSP commerce functionality will retire on July 2, 2021 as planned.” You win some, you lose some.
A report from The Gamer made it known that PlayStation was making the boneheaded decision to end support for the PS3 and PS Vita stores back in March. When the news finally broke later in the month, audiences were furious that nothing was being done to preserve the games that would be lost with the services shutting down, just like much of PlayStation’s older catalog has been progressively lost with the release of their newer systems.
In the time since, PlayStation, and specifically Jim Ryan, have deservedly been getting crap for their position on games archivism, namely their complete disinterest in it, according to comments Ryan made back in 2017.
While this latest move still does very little to preserve what’s there (and PlayStation and Jim Ryan don’t really seem to care to try), it does ensure that we all at least still have access to these stores and games for a while longer. Here’s hoping PlayStation will actually archive their older games so we don’t have to do this all again in a few years.