Rumor: PS3, PSP, and PS Vita online stores shutting down soon

[WoodenSaucer]

So apparently there were still a handful of devs working on Vita games (not sure who would think that's a good idea) but these guys didn't get any heads up and found out the same way the rest of us did. The original rumor, and then the confirmation on the blog. That's kind of a bad way to treat your devs... But I gotta say developing for the Vita in 2021 is questionable...

https://www.thegamer.com/meet-the-devel ... s-forever/

Vita devs? They were probably like the red stapler guy in Office Space. They slowly moved them to the basement until they completely forgot about them.

[Kahhhhyle]

So apparently there were still a handful of devs working on Vita games (not sure who would think that's a good idea) but these guys didn't get any heads up and found out the same way the rest of us did. The original rumor, and then the confirmation on the blog. That's kind of a bad way to treat your devs... But I gotta say developing for the Vita in 2021 is questionable...

https://www.thegamer.com/meet-the-devel ... s-forever/

Vita devs? They were probably like the red stapler guy in Office Space. They slowly moved them to the basement until they completely forgot about them.

Apparently one of those guys bought a dev kit last month. That's the only one I think is kinda rough... Like why are dev kits for sale if the console is discontinued?

[WoodenSaucer]

Apparently one of those guys bought a dev kit last month. That's the only one I think is kinda rough... Like why are dev kits for sale if the console is discontinued?

I kinda can't believe they were surprised they let them go.

[Ninja Monkey]

I love me a good Office Space meme/reference!

[Death]

I was fully expecting you to bring up examples of some obscure games I've never heard of, but those are pretty notable exceptions... And weird. Do you know if it's expected to get fixed?

Now I wonder if there a reason these guys like to discontinue purchases ahead of time. Nintendo did the same thing with the Wii Shop Channel... It's prolly something as basic as making sure people don't buy something and not download it and then lose their purchase or something.

Yeah, it's not just niche games. Some developers, particularly those with games that didn't run at all on PS5, have made patches for their games to make them more compatible with PS5, but I doubt many of the big games will get fixed unless it's possible on Sony's end. I can't imagine Ubisoft going back to 2015's Assassin's Creed: Syndicate to fix the severe shadow flickering on PS5 and I'd be amazed if Volition/Deep Silver wanted to do anything with Agents of Mayhem going forward. I'm doubtful Sony will bother fixing the PS2 emulation too since they gave up on releasing PS2-on-PS4 games at the end of 2017 and Jim Ryan isn't exactly the most interested in backward compatibility and old games.

I've seen some people speculate online that the difference between Microsoft's and Sony's compatibility could be down to their APIs. Sony's are apparently quite low-level while Microsoft's are more abstracted from the hardware. I don't know enough about them to know if that has any weight. But that could explain why even the PS4 Slim and PS4 Pro had some issues with some games that worked fine on the original PS4 (Darksiders II is one that comes to mind, apparently that crashed frequently on both Slim and Pro but only crashed rarely on the OG PS4).

I see your point about some people buying stuff an hour before the servers go down and being unable to finish the download. Maybe a 3-month window between purchases being cut-off and re-downloads being cut-off then? It's still probably not enough in my view though because I'm coming at it from the perspective of someone who can still buy and play Atari 2600 carts from 1977. I personally just hope everything is being backed up elsewhere so it will be available to people who soft-mod/emulate and pirate years into the future.

So apparently there were still a handful of devs working on Vita games (not sure who would think that's a good idea) but these guys didn't get any heads up and found out the same way the rest of us did. The original rumor, and then the confirmation on the blog. That's kind of a bad way to treat your devs... But I gotta say developing for the Vita in 2021 is questionable...

It might be surprising, but the Vita does still have a small but active player base and has still been getting new games. It's just indies since the niche publishers like Idea Factory, Marvelous and Nippon Ichi moved to Switch, PS4 and PC a few years ago, but it does still see new releases fairly frequently (a lot of them are cross-buy with PS4 though).

It's nuts to me that Sony would continue selling Vita dev/test kits and not communicate with all their registered developers who they knew were working on Vita games when they were planning to shutdown the Vita store. Shows how much they value their registered indie devs.

[Kahhhhyle]

I was fully expecting you to bring up examples of some obscure games I've never heard of, but those are pretty notable exceptions... And weird. Do you know if it's expected to get fixed?

Now I wonder if there a reason these guys like to discontinue purchases ahead of time. Nintendo did the same thing with the Wii Shop Channel... It's prolly something as basic as making sure people don't buy something and not download it and then lose their purchase or something.

Yeah, it's not just niche games. Some developers, particularly those with games that didn't run at all on PS5, have made patches for their games to make them more compatible with PS5, but I doubt many of the big games will get fixed unless it's possible on Sony's end. I can't imagine Ubisoft going back to 2015's Assassin's Creed: Syndicate to fix the severe shadow flickering on PS5 and I'd be amazed if Volition/Deep Silver wanted to do anything with Agents of Mayhem going forward. I'm doubtful Sony will bother fixing the PS2 emulation too since they gave up on releasing PS2-on-PS4 games at the end of 2017 and Jim Ryan isn't exactly the most interested in backward compatibility and old games.

I've seen some people speculate online that the difference between Microsoft's and Sony's compatibility could be down to their APIs. Sony's are apparently quite low-level while Microsoft's are more abstracted from the hardware. I don't know enough about them to know if that has any weight. But that could explain why even the PS4 Slim and PS4 Pro had some issues with some games that worked fine on the original PS4 (Darksiders II is one that comes to mind, apparently that crashed frequently on both Slim and Pro but only crashed rarely on the OG PS4).

I see your point about some people buying stuff an hour before the servers go down and being unable to finish the download. Maybe a 3-month window between purchases being cut-off and re-downloads being cut-off then? It's still probably not enough in my view though because I'm coming at it from the perspective of someone who can still buy and play Atari 2600 carts from 1977. I personally just hope everything is being backed up elsewhere so it will be available to people who soft-mod/emulate and pirate years into the future.

That makes sense with Microsoft being a software company and all I think 3 extra months is fine too, but they should give people (especially if there's active development) a bit more time to prepare for this. The 3 months window to make sure all your shizz is downloaded is fine I think

As for emulating some of this stuff. The PSP is already pretty easy to emulate, the Vita and PS3 I don't think will ever be perfect with the goofy/specific hardware they had.

It might be surprising, but the Vita does still have a small but active player base and has still been getting new games. It's just indies since the niche publishers like Idea Factory, Marvelous and Nippon Ichi moved to Switch, PS4 and PC a few years ago, but it does still see new releases fairly frequently (a lot of them are cross-buy with PS4 though).

It's nuts to me that Sony would continue selling Vita dev/test kits and not communicate with all their registered developers who they knew were working on Vita games when they were planning to shutdown the Vita store. Shows how much they value their registered indie devs.

Yes... I've seen that sentiment quite a bit... And again the dev kit thing is like... Borderline evil. But still if your operation is dependant on the Vita in 2021... Not good my guy

[Nicholas]

I just want to point out something in this thread.

Something being largely unknown doesn't make it irrelevant. If you take the effort to make something for an enthusiastic audience and it turns a profit then you are doing good. The people making/porting to the Vita knew what they were doing initially. They were providing games to dedicated Vita fans who love the system and they weighed that the financial profits would be worth it - even from a small audience.

There are MANY communities out there who love less popular games and systems, and what makes them a community/friends is that they share the same interest in that thing.

I mean this entire forum Malk made was because everyone here originally liked the WII U which sold very low numbers to the point those numbers can be considered a legit failure for a company of that size.

It's all about your perspective.

[Nicholas]

I just want to point out something in this thread.

Something being largely unknown doesn't make it irrelevant. If you take the effort to make something for an enthusiastic audience and it turns a profit then you are doing good. The people making/porting games to the Vita knew what they were doing initially. They were providing games to dedicated Vita fans who love the system and they weighed that the financial profits would be worth it - even from a small audience.

There are MANY communities out there who love less popular games and systems, and what makes them a community/friends is that they share the same interest in that thing.

I mean this entire small community here exists because everyone originally liked the WII U which sold very low numbers to the point those numbers can be considered a legit failure for a company of that size.

It's all about your perspective.

[Kahhhhyle]

I just want to point out something in this thread.

Something being largely unknown doesn't make it irrelevant. If you take the effort to make something for an enthusiastic audience and it turns a profit then you are doing good. The people making/porting to the Vita knew what they were doing initially. They were providing games to dedicated Vita fans who love the system and they weighed that the financial profits would be worth it - even from a small audience.

There are MANY communities out there who love less popular games and systems, and what makes them a community/friends is that they share the same interest in that thing.

I mean this entire forum Malk made was because everyone here originally liked the WII U which sold very low numbers to the point those numbers can be considered a legit failure for a company of that size.

It's all about your perspective.

I mean sure. I don't think anybody on here would say it's a good choice to be making Wii U games in 2021. We've got low numbers on here because of the fact that we're the Wii U forum hopping from site to site. lol

I get that those guys had an audience, I get that those guys were making some money with these releases. BUT you can't ignore the fact that you're making Vita games 2021. It's days were always numbered. The way Sony is going about it is pretty bad and I get that they feel burned, but the writing was on the wall here.

[WoodenSaucer]

I just want to point out something in this thread.

Something being largely unknown doesn't make it irrelevant. If you take the effort to make something for an enthusiastic audience and it turns a profit then you are doing good. The people making/porting games to the Vita knew what they were doing initially. They were providing games to dedicated Vita fans who love the system and they weighed that the financial profits would be worth it - even from a small audience.

There are MANY communities out there who love less popular games and systems, and what makes them a community/friends is that they share the same interest in that thing.

I mean this entire small community here exists because everyone originally liked the WII U which sold very low numbers to the point those numbers can be considered a legit failure for a company of that size.

It's all about your perspective.

You're right. There are people today still making new games for the C64 because there's still a fanbase out there. There are people who download these games and even extract them to floppy disks and play them on actual Commodores. But the difference is that it's just hosted on the internet that we all have access to. The problem with a Vita store is that it's hosted by Sony, and they're paying for that server space and traffic. It's worth it for the small devs making games, and it's worth it to hardcore fans, but it wasn't worth it to Sony. Unfortunately they're the ones who have the say because they're footing the bill. Makes me wonder if it could be possible to sideload games from the internet onto a Vita somehow.