Like, this week. Maybe tomorrow, maybe the day after, it's not clear, but sometime in the next few days there will be a new Playstation web store, and you won't be able to buy PS3, PSP, or PS Vita games anywhere other than on a PS3 or PS Vita anymore. And with how the PSV store is missing some games that work with a Vita and the PS3 store is a barely usable nightmare of crashes and awful design, this is a really, really bad thing. But why would Sony care? Those systems are old, anyone not in their new system ecosystem isn't worth caring about, and nor is preservation obviously. As PS head Jim Ryan said once, who'd want to play old games like those [I think he was referring to PS1 Gran Turismo] these days, those graphics are bad!
Oh, and the wishlist feature on the store will also be wiped and go away. It's not clear if the new store will have a wishlist or not, but the old ones will be gone with this update. Thanks.
I agree it's an utter waste on Sony's part. That's money they're leaving on the table, a steady drip drip of retro game sales they're ditching. Now, the good news is the PS3 online store is a BIT more stable than it was for a long time, but having to resort to the PSP and PS3 stores (the PSP store is still functional by the way) going forward isn't as usable.
Ditching functions like a wish list are confusing. Again, what am I missing? Wishlists actually raise the chances someone will come back and buy a game they skipped out on last time. Further, giving gifts, are they ever going to bring that feature to their store? Microsoft finally has it with the XBox One. Nintendo USED to have it on the Wii but seem to have abandoned it on later consoles. Why do people hate giving?
And it's gone now. The old download list went away with the rest of it, making downloading lots of files to a PS3 or Vita is a massive pain now, given how on the devices downloading a file dumps you back up to the very top of the list, making you scroll allllll the way back down to get the next one... it's such a pain! And with Sony's incompetent OS design that forces you to individually download and install every piece of DLC, something that Microsoft and Nintendo would never make you do, this is a significant issue. It was easy with the PC download list, but no, that's gone now because Sony don't care about older games.
And yeah, dropping the wish list makes no sense at all, letting people remembenr what they might want to get is a very good idea, it definitely has led to me buying way more than I otherwise would on, say, Steam and the Switch.
(As for the PSP store, given that the PSP requires wi-fi security to pretty much be dropped in order to go online, no one should be using that thing on the internet so that's not a factor.)
The PSP store does require you to lower security- that's true. However, for my part I have a guest network set up on my router that is utterly cut off from all internal traffic. If I want to use the PSP's wireless, I enable it briefly, use it, then turn it back off. It's so rare and such a small window of time that it's basically nill as a security risk. It's probably better to use the PS3 to download those games and then transfer them to the PSP though.
I have not attempted to get my PSP online in years, I honestly had forgotten that they didn't shut down that store years ago. I just download things to it from my PS3 when I want to put a game on the thing. There is a bit of a hassle there -- for some reason the PS3 won't recognize my micro SD card in micro SD to PSP memory card adapter, so I've got to copy games to a real PSP memory card in my PSP, from that PSP copy them to my PC, then copy them back to the PSP with the micro SD adapter in place again -- but it works, and having 64GB of space is worth the hassle.
That "adapter" is more of a converter. The signals and the way those two cards work aren't directly compatible so it's just a reality of that thing. One of the side effects is that the Memory Stick security system doesn't work when you're using such an adapter. On the PSP, this doesn't matter. Not a single game ever used it and the only content that ever did use MagicGate was a handful of UI themes. The PS3 on the other hand required MagicGate for even basic operations on that port. It's a frustrating limitation. One that you can work around if you instead used the PC, but well...
Ah, okay, I didn't know about that or what MagicGate referred to.
That would be nice, but I don't know of a way to download legitimate PSP games directly to a PC. It's something which should exist but I'm pretty sure does not.