PS3, PSP, Vita games discontinued from browser based and mobile PS Store starting October 21st

This seems especially shitty for the PSP considering the store front on the PSP itself shut down awhile back, which apparently they forgot in this e-mail, which says "However, you will still be able to buy PS3™, PSP or PS Vita content by accessing PS Store directly from your PS3, PSP or PS Vita.". Also makes me wonder how much longer those Vita and PS3 stores stay up too.

Really wish Sony put the effort in to emulate these platforms on PS5 so we could keep these libraries around going forward. I'd really like to box up my PS3 and play games like MGS 4 and Beatles Rock Band on PS5.

This is super crappy for a number of reasons. Not least of which because the PS Vita and PS3 stores suck. I use my PS3 fairly regularly and downloading stuff that's not on the hard drive is just always a pain. I own basically everything I want on both systems (especially now that they no longer do PS3 and Vita game sales) but accessing that content and even knowing what I own is already a mess.

I would bet this is at least partially about discoverability because the PSN store interface sucks so much ass and any time you try to look for something you end up seeing tons of old games and DLC and even themes and avatars. Xbox store is better because it groups DLC under games and doesn't populate it into searches in the same way. Looking through PSN sales was always a nightmare because they'd be stuffed with 99 cent themes that nobody wanted.

One reason that backwards compatibility on Xbox is so great is because it means that the Xbox 360 store will probably never die, since they can continue selling those games forever. Even moreso with Gamepass because Xbox 360 games are often cheap filler titles.

Digital online stores should all be like Steam where you can access whatever you bought indefinitely. I understood when the ancient console stores closed (like original Xbox and even the Nintendo Wii) because they weren't thinking about backwards compatibility and future proofing, but those things should be obvious concerns at this point, and they should have solutions. People are still playing their old systems! And while they may not sell a lot of digital games for systems that old, they will sell more digital games in the future if people are confident that they will still be around when they want them later down the line. Letting me download Ratchet Deadlocked on my PS3 means I am more likely to buy Ratchet and Clank digitally on my PS5 some day.

Removing the Wishlist thing seems crappy. Assuming this is for the PS4 content aswell. Maybe/hopefully replacing with a better one for PS5? Or maybe this is discontinued Wishlist for discontinued content. Unclear.

Hopefully you can still access your full download list and add to the download queue from the website. I use PSDLE (for chrome) as the main way to search though my list of old PS3/PSP/Vita games, and for de-listed games it is far easier then scrolling though the download list which can only be looked at by purchased date. And the last time i used the download list from the PS3 it would crash after scrolling for so long, and im not sure if its in the regular PS3 store since that thing ran like trash and i just used the website from then on as my main way of purchasing games.

And if you just have a PSP you might be screwed? but with a PS3 you should still be able to buy and install from there.

The eradication of the wishlist feature is completely bonkers, to me.

This seems like a loss for (legal) game preservation, especially as PSP parts availability declines and repairing old systems will be harder. At least there are still cheap Chinese batteries on eBay.

That said, I've since migrated over to playing emulated backups of games I already own, upscaled on my TV in 1080p, using Steam Link, with a Switch Pro Controller. :P

@lego_my_eggo: Wow, thank you so much for the link to that browser plugin!!! I was going to manually catalog all my Ps3/Vita digital purchases in a spreadsheet this weekend before the web store goes kaput (mainly for ease of reference later on, but also to download some stuff onto my Vita I may have forgotten about...turns out I own more digital PSP/PS1 games than I remember) - that plugin made it trivial to export the info and save it off. You saved me a lot of work this weekend :)

I never had a PS3 or either Sony handheld, so that part doesn't affect me (though I understand that is sucks). Losing the wishlist is insane, though. So much easier to wishlist a game and just refresh every few days to see if anything has gone on sale. Especially since Sony seems to run two or three different sales concurrently on a regular basis. With this change, I would have to write the games down, keep the list by my computer and then manually look up each game to see what the price is. I have bought so many more games on Sony than XBox primarily because of this wishlist. Really strange decision.

Weird that the wishlist and themes are going away. I guess it's one of those bean-counting "this line went slightly below this line on the graph" decisions.

I'm actually here to recommend downloading the very rad Songbringer PS4 theme while you still can. I've never played or even seen Songbringer but I will happily use that theme forever.

Welp, time to buy all of those Senran Kagura .jpegs apparently.

Edit 11/19/20
I can still buy the .jpegs. I just have to buy them though the actual consoles, though.

Oh for fucks sake.

Well I guess I'm gonna have to make a list of every PS3 game I have on my wishlist right now so I can remember all of them. There are a bunch of PS1 and 2 games they have digitally up there that I really wanted to get, and a few actual PS3 games.

Sony, you're lucky you're the platform to go to for JRPGs and other niche japanese games or I would have given you up for xbox years ago.

The less effort companies (intentionally or not) make towards backwards compatibility, the less I care to buy their consoles. There are some genuinely great PSP RPGs that will never get touched now unless someone does the work to rebuild them from the ground up, which would just be a bafflingly bad business decision.

Whelp this new update is crap. I can only hope things are still rolling out because almost every aspect of the old web store was better. Search will not auto complete, DLC for a game isn't linked to that games store page, and they did remove the download list with the old games. I cant see how long my PS+ sub is good for, just says i apparently have no subscriptions. Just a trash update all around.

@lego_my_eggo: You weren't kidding! And the layout sucks. It's gone from a relatively easy to handle list to a weird grid with larger icons that makes it less usable. On the plus side there are more than 12 items per page now, so that's a significant plus.

But the old store was mostly fine. This is a massive downgrade.

Why do companies think that what we want in a store is big graphics and uncluttered design instead of fucking functionality.

I get that eye catching design can help sell stuff, but Amazon is the most successful web store in the world and it doesn't use these kinds of layouts.

Not much to add other than yes, this is garbage. I can't even get the store pages to load properly.

@ry_ry: Sony should learn from Nintendo by treating their classics respectively. Microsoft are doing a great job too.

I understand that they don't want PS5 contents to be buried under the huge amount of PS classics but the solution is quite simple.

Use the same code for PS5 store tweak it a little bit then establish a Classics store. What's so hard in that?

tfw u scoop someone u follow on Twitter

The new store is fucking terrible. Typical mobile UI enforced on everyone, and there's not even screenshots of the games anymore, only cover art.

People warned that this is what would happen after a couple generations. Now everyone is "shockedpikachu.png" when they did it. This is the digital future everyone asked for. Enjoy it.

@crusader8463: People warned that the digital store would get really bad because of a crappy and weird redesign?

PS3 and Vita games are still downloadable. PSP games are still downloadable provided that you own a PS3.

This is just Sony being bad at the Internet. The PS4 is still their main console for a couple weeks but you can't download themes for some stupid reason. Getting rid of the wishlist had nothing to do with phasing out old content and just relates to Sony having bad design philosophies.

Meanwhile the Xbox 360 store will likely be up indefinitely because of backwards compatibility. If you bought Geometry Wars in 2005 you can still download and play it 15 years later on your Series-X. If you bought some PS3 game in 2006 digitally you can still download and play it if you have a PS3, it's just kind of a pain in the butt.

I think even proponents of digital games didn't expect either of those true, and definitely didn't expect that a game like Geometry Wars would still be downloadable two generations of hardware and a decade and a half later!

Sony doing away with the Wishlist doesn't feel like them being bad at the internet, it feels like them prioritizing sales of new games over customers patience to wait for sales on older games.

@petesix0: I didn't say that the wishlist was because they were bad at the Internet, I said it was because they have bad design philosophies. It's possible that they got rid of the wishlist because they thought it encouraged people to wait until software was on sale, but there are other possible reasons (ranging from a desire to streamline to a desire to try and get people to browse the store and comb through sales more instead of relying on the wishlist).

It seems like a weird move given that digital stores ranging from Steam to Amazon feature wishlist functions and both Steam and Amazon are really really good at selling things over the Internet.

The thing that's Sony being bad at the Internet is making it impossible to buy themes online (because they should have been able to separate out the search function between games and themes and just segregate themes in their own section of the store) and also, of course, the weird DLC linking issues and removing screenshots from the store. The new store is just lacking in a lot of functions that would help Sony sell more stuff, not just functions that might help customers save money.

@bigsocrates: Almost completely agree, just didn't at you because. From my own perspective I can say these things are bad, but also that I'm prepared to say I can see why they would remove capacity for remembering times Sony's pitch was unsuccessful - to instead focus on mainlining the pitch for the new games. If Steam were to remove the list then that would be a fundamental enough move to make me consider my future gaming habits, so that Sony were prepared to do this with such a short notice period before they follow through, is concerning.

Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that was their solution for cleaning out the old systems. Rather than updating everyone's lists to match the new database, they just nuked everything.

For anyone who still needs to grab there wishlist, i come bearing gifts of a link. Looks like you can even still purchase stuff, tested it with a free demo of a PSP game just to try things out. And PSDLE is still working, but not sure if it is still queuing things up for download or not since that part of the site is gone, and i haven't tried it with a PS3 game yet.

Is anyone else having issues with the new store? It often won't show me prices on PS4 games or let me try to buy stuff or...anything. It just seems to suck very badly in a lot of ways, beyond just the obvious design issues discussed here.

Thank you for this. It appears that the sales are still being updated on the wishlist as well, so that is something at least. The regular store was doing a weird thing where if I clicked on the account information it was showing me as logged in, but that information wasn't transfarring to show me what games I had purchased already. I really hope they get things figured out sometime soon.

@sparky_buzzsaw: Totally agree. I mean all this stuff keeps me from going in all digital as well. I mean I'm not a huge buyer of games, but if there is no real reason why they can't do backwards compatibility, it definitely turns me off too. I get back in the day when the GameCube couldn't technically run N64 games with different media formats and the limited processing power. But at this point, there is no reason why I shouldn't be able to pop a CD ROM into a PS4 and be able to play it.

Just an update here: Looks like the old store (and wishlist page) is completely gone now. Everything redirects back to the new monstrosity. Which I still hate, especially since it seems to log me out every 90 minutes and it takes two or three times to properly log back in.

ETA: Looks like they have added wishlist functionality to the new store. Of course, they didn't carry over the old lists, but at least that is something.

@redwing42: What are you talking about? The new store is amazing. I love not being able to see screen shots or trailers of games, and even more I love not having links to DLC from a game.

My favorite feature is that if someone selling a bundle or deluxe edition didn't list all the contents in the description, you don't even know what you're buying because it doesn't automatically show what's included!

Even better, if there are multiple editions of a game you will see them on the store page but while you can add them to cart, there isn't a link so if you want to read the description you need to do a separate search.

Finally, a store that helps me control my spending by making buying things into a massive pain in the butt.