26th June 2024, 9:52 PM
As of right now, the only store older than the generation before this one that will remain up is Sony's. I have to give them credit. While they WANTED to shut it all down, they kept it up well past expected timelines. I don't expect that to last. They've probably been waiting until the competition shut their's down first. But, as of right now, if you want to buy PS3, PSVita, or PSP content (through a few loops on that last one admittedly), you still can.
As for online play, that still will remain up on 360, but that's doomed to get taken down soon too. They already killed off the whole Halo franchise primarily to push sales of "Hello: The Mister Chef Concoction" on newer consoles. I smell EXACTLY what they were cooking when they did that. PS3 still has working online play, but again, that's limited.
Hacking is the only way to restore function on these older online consoles, and I'm very glad hackers have found ways to reverse engineer so much. I just wish it wasn't necessary. As you say, no care is extended whatsoever for preservation. The individual game designers may care about their work, but the people running these corporations don't care one bit. Look at how Nintendo treats their retro games. Sure, I love the work they did remaking some of their titles recently, but the "virtual console" is a money-grubbing joke wherein I have to pay a yearly fee to get access to a bunch of ROMs with NO way to actually buy any of the games outright. That means the moment Switch online goes dark, all of those virtual console games won't be playable at all, short of hacking the console to remove the check-in restriction.
As for online play, that still will remain up on 360, but that's doomed to get taken down soon too. They already killed off the whole Halo franchise primarily to push sales of "Hello: The Mister Chef Concoction" on newer consoles. I smell EXACTLY what they were cooking when they did that. PS3 still has working online play, but again, that's limited.
Hacking is the only way to restore function on these older online consoles, and I'm very glad hackers have found ways to reverse engineer so much. I just wish it wasn't necessary. As you say, no care is extended whatsoever for preservation. The individual game designers may care about their work, but the people running these corporations don't care one bit. Look at how Nintendo treats their retro games. Sure, I love the work they did remaking some of their titles recently, but the "virtual console" is a money-grubbing joke wherein I have to pay a yearly fee to get access to a bunch of ROMs with NO way to actually buy any of the games outright. That means the moment Switch online goes dark, all of those virtual console games won't be playable at all, short of hacking the console to remove the check-in restriction.
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)