Sony reverses decision on closing PS3, PS Vita stores

Sony will no longer be ending purchasing support for PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita games, the company announced today.

Last month, Sony revealed that the stores for the PS3, PS Vita, and PlayStation Portable would cease functioning over the summer. But thanks in large part to big community backlash, the former two stores will now remain online.

“Recently, we notified players that PlayStation Store for PS3 and PS Vita devices was planned to end this summer,” said Jim Ryan, Sony Interactive Entertainment president and CEO, in a new blog post. “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.”

The older PlayStation handheld, the PSP, will cease commerce functionality on July 2, as planned originally. This will likely still upset a sect of the community, but Sony is moving forward with the decision.

“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,” Ryan said. “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.”

The initial announcement on March 29 was met with much disappointment from the community. Moving forward, PS3 and PS Vita holdouts should be happy with today’s news.

“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,” Ryan said.