PlayStation reverses decision to close PS3 and PS Vita stores following backlash

Sony has reversed their decision to close the PS3 and PS Vita PlayStation Stores following negative feedback.

Announced in a PlayStation blog post, Sony Interactive Entertainment president and CEO, Jim Ryan, explained they’ll now keep stores open on the PS3 and PS Vita consoles. The PSP remaining store functionality however will still end on 2nd July 2021.

“Upon further reflection, it’s clear that we made the wrong decision here,” the post reads. 

“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.

• Read more: 25 games we can’t wait to play in 2021

“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 it’s good to see Sony listening to PlayStation fans, this might dampen hopes they're working on a worthwhile way of accessing past titles across PS4 and PS5 — with this reversal suggesting they were happy to close down the stores without any future alternative. 

This is good news however for small developers who almost had their work wiped from existence. The big question is whether PlayStation will even try to come up with a rival to Xbox Game Pass moving forward, which is fast becoming Microsoft's greatest asset.