With the PlayStation 5 now out in the wild and slowly making its way to gamers (and scalpers) around the world, Sony seems to be planning to shut down the PlayStation Store on a number of its older consoles. This is according to a report by TheGamer, citing sources familiar with the matter, and it indicates that you'll soon be unable to buy digital games on the PlayStation 3, PlayStation Portable, and PlayStation Vita.
The first platforms on the death row are the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Portable, whose stores are set to close on July 2. It makes sense for these platforms to be shut down, seeing as both consoles are two generations old at this point, having received successors even before the PlayStation 5. The more recent PlayStation Vita is getting cut off on August 27, almost two months later.
The PlayStation Portable was first released on December 12, 2004 in Japan, and throughout 2005 in other markets. It was Sony's first portable console and it competed with the Nintendo DS, and it was fairly successful, with an estimated 80 to 82 million units sold in its lifetime - the last official number is 76.4 million and refers to March 2012, but units continued to be sold for a while after that.
Meanwhile, the PlayStation 3 was released in November 2006 in Japan and North America, and despite a slow start due to its ludicrous launch price, Sony turned the tide and sold 87.4 million units of the console (as of March 2017), beating out the Xbox 360 by a small margin.
As for the PlayStation Vita, it's the most recent of the three consoles, but it's also the least successful. Launched in late 2011 in Japan and early 2012 worldwide, the PlayStation Vita is the successor to the Portable, and it sold so poorly that Sony stopped reporting sales figures in 2012. You can't find any sales data for the console on Sony's corporate page, either, but it's estimated the console sold 16 million units in its lifetime. Because of that, despite being more recent, it wouldn't be surprising if Sony is discontinuing the PlayStation Store on it as well.
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