In March, Japanese tech and gaming giant Sonys suffered widespread criticism when it had announced plans to close PS3 and Vita stores and remove the ability to purchase PSP games at both stores.
The criticism led Sony to partially postpone the course, and then eventually take back the controversial decision.
It has promised to keep PS3 and Vita stores open, but the company remained committed to ending PSP commercial functionality/operations on July 2.
What Does It Mean?
While it was vague of what that meant at the time, Sony has explained and shed some more clarity on the entire situation:
You will still be able to purchase new PSP games at PS3 and Vita stores, but you will not be able to purchase the new DLC, according to UK and US company pages (via Kotaku).
Here are three new questions that Sony answered with intent to clarify things, including that it would take away the function to search or download DLC from the PSP store on July 6:
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Q.) How Does It Affect PSP Owners?
Ans.) From July 6th, 2021, there will be no longer the choice given to PSP owners to perform searches or make in-game purchases.
Q.) I Already Have Purchased Game Content On My PSP. Will That Be Gone?
Ans.) No, You can download all your previously purchased PSP contents onto your portable device through the Download section in your PSP.
Competitors
Compared to Microsoft, it uses multi-generational retrieval as the largest Xbox Series X unique selling point.
But playing older games on Sony consoles may be more difficult. Playstation 5 currently plays most of the Playstation 4 games, but if you want to play games from older generations in the new Sony console, you’ll need to pay for the Playstation Now registration, which allows you to play Playstation 3 and Playstation 2 games through the cloud backup, or buy a full price release of the classic.
For PSP, there is still a possible way to buy popular handheld games, at least for now. Let’s see what the future of this classic portable brings.