Fans were distraught last month when Sony announced that they would be shutting down the PlayStation 3, PlayStation Vita, and PlayStation Portable stores. This is largely due to the number of games that would be 100% lost if these digital storefronts closed, most notably many PS One classics, Arcade only titles, and other fighting games released on those consoles.

Thankfully, Sony has reversed course on this decision, at least partially. They have announced that they will keep open the Vita and PS3 shops but will still be closing down the PlayStation Portable store. This is largely due to the outcry from fans, which caused Sony to reconsider their position.

“Recently, we notified players that PlayStation Store for PS3 and PS Vita devices was planned to end this summer,” said Jim Ryan, Sony Interactive Entertainment’s president and CEO, in a statement. “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.”

The original reasoning was broken down and pretty predictable – Sony wanted to focus their resources and customer support on their newer platforms, including the PS4 and PS5.

“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,” he continued. “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.”

Sony acknowledged the importance of keeping classic titles born on their consoles alive in their statement. “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,” Ryan concluded.

While it remains to be seen just how long the “foreseeable future” is, it’s good to see that Sony is at least somewhat committed to making sure players can still access these titles on aging platforms. Without these storefronts, it would be impossible to purchase some games digitally, and it’s unclear exactly how it would function for games that were already purchased but not downloaded. This led to a large amount of discourse about the ownership of digital games and whether it’s right for a platform holder to be expected to maintain a storefront and servers for these games far after their shelf date. With games increasingly being purchased digitally over physically (much to the chagrin of folks like GameStop), this will likely be a conversation that we’ll have for years to come in the gaming community and industry at large.