Recently, PlayStation drew criticism for announcing plans to close the PlayStation Store on the PlayStation 3 and the PS Vita this summer. Today, the company decided to drop those plans.

On the PlayStation Blog, Sony Interactive Entertainment president & CEO Jim Ryan stated:

“Recently, we notified players that PlayStation Store for PS3 and PS Vita devices was planned to end this summer.
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. PSP commerce functionality will retire on July 2, 2021 as planned.
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. 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.
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.
Thank you for sharing your feedback with us – we’re always listening and appreciate the support from our PlayStation community.”

Launched in 2006, the PlayStation 3 would go on to sell over 87 million units worldwide. While the PlayStation 4 was released in 2013, the PlayStation 3 was still being developed, but that would change over time. In 2017, Japan became the last country to stop producing PlayStation 3 consoles. The last game released on the console was 2020’s Shakedown: Hawaii.

Launched in 2011, the PlayStation Vita wouldn’t live up to its predecessor the PSP. While the PSP sold 80 million units worldwide, the Vita would only sell 16 million units. The console was known for delivering exciting exclusive games, including Persona 4 Golden (which was ported to Steam last year) and Soul Sacrifice.