Vita means life as PlayStation announces PS3 and Vita PSN stores to remain open, PSP store closing

Today, PlayStation announced its reversal to the impending shutdown of the PlayStation Network commerce services for the PlayStation 3 and Vita, with both platforms’ digital stores open for business. While the news is pretty good overall, the PlayStation Portable offerings will retire on July 2 as planned previously.

From Jim Ryan, President and CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment:

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.

We’re glad we can keep our game preservation efforts alive for another day, but pour one out for the PSP this July (and don’t forget to purchase what you want to now)! Stay tuned for more news here on Gaming Trend.