An email being sent to PlayStation users today announced that Sony will be introducing a new PlayStation Store on web and mobile later this month. The benefits are unclear, but several features will be removed, including the ability to buy legacy content and build a personal wishlist.
Starting on October 21, the new PlayStation Store will begin to remove PlayStation 3, PlayStation Vita, and PlayStation Portable games and add-ons along with apps, themes, and avatars for those platforms. Both the web and mobile versions of the store should complete this process by October 28, after which customers will need to access the PlayStation Store directly through those legacy consoles to make purchases.
Wishlists, which allow users to save games for future purchase, are also being phased out.
As development focus shifted to the PlayStation 4, optimizing the PlayStation Store experience on previous platforms apparently became less of a priority. And with the PlayStation Portable losing access to its built-in store in 2016—and now even the ever-useful web-based version—PSP users will need to purchase content for their handhelds through either a PS3 or Vita, the latter of which only makes a subset of PSP content available.
I recently had a hell of a time buying Demon’s Souls due to the atrocious, juddery performance of the PlayStation 3’s store app, and while that’s certainly anecdotal, it’s a shame to know I’m now stuck with that experience if I should wish to buy further PS3 content.