Sony Reverses Course: PS Store on PS3 & PS Vita Will Remain Operational for “Foreseeable Future”

In a surprising reversal, Sony has changed their mind about retiring the PlayStation Store on PlayStation 3 and PS Vita. Originally scheduled to be phased out on those platforms on July 2 later this year, Sony has announced today that the PS Store on PS3 and PS Vita will continue on and players will be able to continue buying and downloading games from the storefront on those consoles.

Citing player response to the move and self-reflection, Sony admitted to making the wrong move and searched for a way to continue operations.

The statement from Sony Interactive Entertainment president and CEO Jim Ryan isn’t overly long, so here it is in full below:

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. 

I certainly wasn’t expecting Sony to change their mind on this, and quickly browsing the reactions to this news on Twitter, it appears I wasn’t the only one that was surprised by this change of heart.

I’m not sure how anyone could see a negative here. We’ll take the good news to start off our week!