The Playstation 3 is IDENTITY THEFT

Here's a pretty good video highlighting titles which will soon be either impossible to play or, in some cases, only playable via some insanely-expensive copy of the game for a previous gen console:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6mhjqI6EEc

And that's really just skimming the surface. It's kind of heartbreaking how many good games are gonna wind up being essentially wiped off the face of the earth.

was thinking of futureproofing my PS3 by swapping the hard drive for a 1TB SDD, anyone else done this? looks easy enough from YT guides, but sounds like others have had the same idea, the PS3 servers have been getting hammered since the closedown announcement.

Swapping a hard drive in a PS3 is super easy. You can actually go up to a 1.75 TB, I believe. And yeah, I was planning to do that eventually but eventually looks like it's gonna be sooner than I thought.

I wish they'd just let users back up PS3 downloads to an external drive. At least with Vita, I'm able to save all my game downloads to an external drive so I don't have to worry about the inevitable day when PSN no longer allows you to even download the previous gen games you bought.

I haven't dabbled in a while, but what's the state of PS2 and PS3 emulation? From what I heard both are pretty solid at this point.

That video was great, btw. Made me realize just how much of the PS1/PS2 era I'm unaware of. So many strategy RPGs! I took notes, trying to figure out which ones I'll buy before July. A real shame Sony doesn't care about preserving these - at least Microsoft seems to understand the value of having the back catalog, at least for now.

I've bought a bunch of the PS1 titles when they were on sale for $3, should've picked up more. Maybe Sony will do another big sale before the store closes down.

That's what people are banking on but I wouldn't count on it. I don't think they've had sales on any PS3 titles in a year, maybe even two. And I mean they still have PSP titles marked at $30 so I'm not even counting on a general price drop.

I dont understand the rationale behind not just fire sale-ing everything in the last few weeks of the PS3, PSP, Vita?

Surely any revenue from a PS3 game is better than none? I have a few games on disc but would be happier, just keeping the PS3 as a download only system.

I am not even sure I have the pS3 connected to a network anymore, my old Phat Ps3 died, and took most of my saves with it.

but I could easily start a few classic games if they were downloaded onto the system and I didn't have to go hunting for the disc.

I dont understand the rationale behind not just fire sale-ing everything in the last few weeks of the PS3, PSP, Vita?

Well I think the rationale is "we've announced these are shutting down and oh look, suddenly we're making a ton of sales even at full price, so let's not discount anything".

It's prompted me to look into hacking my vita though, which I've never considered before, and the revelation in there is that modded consoles can use microSD instead of Sony's obscenely overpriced proprietary vita memory cards! So yeah I'm in, even if I end up never pirating anything on there anyway (which I likely won't, because I already pretty much own everything I'd want to play on it), being able to keep 10x more of my legitimately owned games on the device at the same time is a huge plus.

Oh, that's cool news. Maybe I'll just finish downloading all of my owned Vita games and just do that.

Not only have they not discounted any games, but up until very recently you could still (with some effort and jiggery pokery) access the PS3 and Vita stuff via their website. But they shut that shit down I guess when they made the announcement, so now you have to navigate the store via the respective consoles. The site has always been pretty janky but it's better than the alternative. So good luck finding stuff.

So I went through the hack process last night (still waiting for an SD card adaptor to be delivered so I've not done the fun bits yet). It's one of the dirtiest mods I've ever seen though ha! If you want to install pirated games, you don't even need to go hunting for roms or anything. You literally just install an app which mimics the PSN store, with a list of everything on there, and when you pick one it basically just goes "ok, just installing a fake licence for that, and then hey we'll trigger the download from the official store". So yeah people are pulling their pirate games direct from Sony's servers ffs. It's so rude.

That'll still work when the store closes down too, because the store closure will stop you buying new stuff but won't stop you redownloading stuff you already own. And this spoofs the "I already own it" bit.

The shaky part is that obviously Sony can see you downloading this stuff, and can also see that you don't actually own it. This thing's been running for 5 years and they've never banned anyone's account for using it (unlike similar PS3 mods where apparently they still regularly shut down accounts) so people seem to think it's unlikely they'll suddenly change their minds and boot everyone but still....I'm probably going to need to set up a burner PSN account just for the vita, just to be safe. And I'm yeah not even planning to pirate stuff, I'm just here for the MicroSD compatibility and maybe to have yet another place I can install retroarch then never use it.

lol, so glad I've given the PSN store hundreds (or thousands, more likely?) of my dollars. Clearly a very worthwhile investment.

managed to get the SSD installed, forgot how cumbersome installing games on the PS3 is. so much faffing about!
now to go thru my download queue, had both a UK and a US account, this may take some time ...

lol so it took 5 days to download everything I wanted on the PS3 store and patch them, PSN is soooooo slooooooow
now to jailbreak this fucker

Uh...wow!

https://blog.playstation.com/2021/04/19/playstation-store-on-ps3-and-ps-vita-will-continue-operations/

Poking around the various places on the internet, it sure looked like reactions were incredibly negative, with many people echoing my general feeling that, if Sony cares so little about preserving their legacy IP, I don't see myself buying any later gen Sony consoles in the future. So this is heartening!

vita isnt even a decade old yet. that's like if they discontinued the ps4 store next year

They've literally released new (shitty-looking, but still) Vita games on the PSN store in 2021.

shocked that Sony actually paid attention! there must've been a surge of buying.

Based on that blog post and what was discussed in a recent AMA with a former Playstation employee, it sounds like this decision all came down to not wanting to maintain whatever form of payment verification they maintain on the PS3/Vita side of the store. I guess if users have demonstrated that it's worthwhile to maintain, Sony is willing to eat the cost and manpower.

It was all just seems so stupid anyway. I get generally miffed when people/big corporate entities just sit on IP instead of releasing it to the public but doubly so when it's freakin' digital media. If you don't have to deal with the infrastructure of manufacturing/storing physical copies of a thing, the costs of making it accessible have to be minimal for a company of that size. Like you either keep the store up and you make maybe not a huge amount of money but at least some money off of this shit you have the rights to make money off of, or you shut it down and you make zero money and you engender ill will.

It was all just seems so stupid anyway.

Ye gods: https://kotaku.com/sony-playstation-hack-breach-ransomware-ransomed-vc-1850870993

i’d think if you had access to “all of Sony’s systems” you’d have more than 6000… log files? html? eh??