Sony announced it Online purchases for PlayStation 3, PS Vita and PSP will be discontinued later that year. The PS3 online shop will close on July 2, 2021, while the Vita shop will close on August 27, 2021. PSP games will also be removed for purchase from both consoles on July 2nd.
The announcement comes just months after the company removed all PS3, Vita and PSP content from the PSN webshop in October 2020.
Because of these changes, you will not be able to purchase any digital PS3, Vita, or PSP games, DLC, or media content at all after the closings of the online shop. Even the PS4 or PS5 online stores cannot buy older PlayStation titles other than a small selection of PS2 and PS3 games through the PS Now streaming service.
It’s frustrating to see Sony ditch its legacy library like this, especially as Microsoft adds Backward compatibility improvements The Make old Xbox and PC games better than everand Nintendo continues to port its classic catalog to Switch (even though it’s digital own conservation issues). It also highlights a Main problem with digital-only game consoles. But the most pressing question is, what does this mean for PS3, Vita, and PSP digital games that you already own?
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For the most part, you can still download digitally purchased games from the “Download List” in the Vita and PS3 PSN apps and play them on your PS3, Vita, or PSP. You can continue to play as many physical copies of games as you want. However, you will no longer be able to purchase any downloadable content from PSN.
Now is the time to buy that digital content for the PS3, Vita, and PSP that you’ve stuck to – if you can find it, then it will. Sony removed the wish list from the PS Vita and PS3 when older PlayStation games were removed from the PSN webshop, making the notoriously cumbersome storefronts for these consoles even more difficult to use.
Here’s how to back up your old PSN games locally
You should also consider backing up all of your PSN purchases locally in case something is suddenly lost from your download list. The process differs between each console and can be a long time if you have a large digital library, but it’s worth it.
To be clear, it doesn’t require all of your old PSN games to be downloaded and saved locally. Your PSP, Vita, and PS3 games will continue to appear in your PSN download list as long as they remain available on PSN. That said, it will be a lot easier to copy over your locally saved content than dealing with the bad PSN saves (or lack thereof) on older PlayStation consoles. Going through the process now will save you a headache if Sony inevitably ends all PSN support for these older consoles in the future.