Recently, Sony announced that the PlayStation Store on the PS3 and PS Vita would close later this year, meaning you can no longer purchase new digital games on those devices. Sony has now decided to reverse their decision and will continue to operate both Stores. However, the PSP Store will be retired as planned on 2nd July 2021.
A statement on the reversal was posted on the PlayStation Blog by Jim Ryan, President & CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment. The statement said:
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.
For the moment, it looks like the PlayStation Store on the PS3 and PS Vita are saved. Sony will no doubt continue to monitor the situation and may decide to close the Stores down in the future.