For the past few days, a PlayStation Store outage on the PS3 had users worried about it being suddenly and permanently closed. Those fears have now been allayed as the PS3’s digital storefront lives to see another day, at least for now.
Concerns about the storefront’s future aren’t new, as Sony originally announced in 2021 that it intended to shut down the PlayStation Store on the PS3, PSP, and PS Vita, effectively rendering hundreds of games exclusive to these consoles digitally unobtainable. Widespread backlash ultimately beckoned Sony to backpedal on this decision at the time, but the fear lingered among fans of these legacy PlayStation consoles. The PS3 is notoriously difficult to emulate or port games from, meaning that once its store is gone, many titles will simply vanish from modern availability.
The PS3’s PlayStation Store Suffered a Four-Day Outage
Over the past week, that anxiety came rushing back, as the PS3 store was completely inaccessible for over four days with no official explanation from Sony. Social media and online forums quickly piled up with speculation, with some fans assuming that the PS3 store shutdown had finally been initiated, that too without warning. The absence of an announcement made the situation even more tense, especially given Sony’s relatively quiet stance on the PS3’s long-term support.
Thankfully, the PS3 store outage has now been fixed, and user reports confirm that purchases, downloads, and browsing are all fully operational again. The cause of the outage remains a mystery, though. There’s no sign of a structural change or major update to the PS3 store in recent memory, and Sony hasn’t issued a statement explaining the downtime either. It could well be that the server hardware and platforms running the PS3 store behind the scenes are quite outdated, and therefore prone to technical faults.
Though the PS3 store coming back online and continuing to stay operational for the foreseeable future is a relief, users should be wary of the fact that Sony is most likely planning to retire it at some point. Keeping legacy servers and platforms alive can be very expensive and resource-intensive, and though the PS3 still sees around a million active users on average, keeping them satisfied might not outweigh the opportunity cost of simply focusing on the PS4/PS5 storefronts and saving money for Sony. The perfect middle-ground solution here is to get PS3 backwards compatibility working on PS5 – or perhaps the PS6 – and make those legacy games purchasable on the modern PlayStation Store.
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