The Playstation 3 is IDENTITY THEFT

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??