How to Back up Your Old PlayStation Games Locally (and Why You Need It)
Sony announced that it will end online purchases of the PlayStation 3, PS Vita and PSP later this year. The PS3 Online Store will close on July 2, 2021 and the Vita Store will close on August 27, 2021. On July 2nd, PSP games will also be removed for purchase on both consoles.
The announcement came just months after the company removed all content for PS3, Vita and PSP from the PSN online store back in October 2020.
Due to these changes, you will not be able to purchase digital PS3, Vita or PSP games, DLCs, or media content on all of the following store closures . Even on PS4 or PS5 online stores, you cannot buy old PlayStation games, except for a small selection of PS2 and PS3 games through the PS Now streaming service.
It’s unfortunate to see Sony ditch their legacy library like this, especially as Microsoft is adding backward compatibility improvements that make older Xbox and PC games better than ever , and Nintendo continues to port its classic catalog to Switch (although she has problems with preserving digital data. own ). It also indicates a serious problem with digital-only gaming consoles . But the most pressing question is: what does this mean for the digital PS3, Vita and PSP games you already own?
For the most part, you can still download and play digitally purchased games on your PS3, Vita, or PSP from the Download List in the Vita and PS3 PSN apps. You can also keep playing physical copies of the games for as long as you want, but you will no longer be able to buy downloadable content on PSN.
It’s time to buy whatever digital content for PS3, Vita, and PSP you can hang on to, if you find it. Sony removed wishlist features from the PS Vita and PS3 when it removed older PlayStation games from the PSN online store, making the notoriously bulky display cases for these consoles even more difficult to use.
How to back up your old PSN games locally
You should also consider backing up all your PSN purchases locally in case something suddenly disappears from your download list. The process is different for each console and can be time-consuming if you have a large digital library, but it’s worth it.
- PlayStation 3 owners can transfer data to an external USB hard drive using the console’s backup utility .
- PlayStation Vita players can back up their games and save them to PS3 or PC using the PS Vita Content Manager app.
- PlayStation Portable users can back up data to PC or PS3 using USB micro cable or by copying their SD card to PC. You can also download your PSP games to PS3 or PSVita via PSN .
To be clear, you don’t need to download and store all of your old PSN games locally; your PSP, Vita, and PS3 games will continue to appear in your PSN download list as long as they are available on PSN. However, it will be much easier to copy your local content than dealing with substandard PSN stores (or lack thereof) on legacy PlayStation consoles. And doing this process now will save you some headaches as Sony will inevitably end PSN support for these older consoles in the future.