Bandit LOAF

Bandit LOAF

Long Live the Confederation!
There's bad news from the folks at Sony today: they have announced plans to shut down the PS3 and PSP digital storefronts over the course of the next year. This will remove two digitally sold Wing Commander games from circulation: the PSN port of fWing Commander IV in the US store and the digital version of EA Replay in the European store. EA Replay is available physically but Wing Commander IV is not; get yours today! The US store hosting it will close in July 2027.





Shockingly, this announcement is part of an unpopular reveal that PlayStation consoles will be digital only starting around that same time. Nothing sells consumer confidence in your digital storefront like immediately making folks' previous purchases unavailable. It's a terrible time for game preservation... or just people that, you know, enjoy playing games.

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Original update published on July 1, 2026
 
I'm not sure the loss of physical media is much of a loss at all when it comes to games. So much of games comes post launch now both in terms of basic functionality and content I'm not sure owning the launch day disk is owning much of anything at all.
 
Yeah, physical discs these days are really little more than a way to hold a license to a game. It's why the uproar over the Nintendo Switch 2 key cards was quite an unusual thing - because for basically every physical release of a game that's what the physical disc was. You buy an Xbox or PlayStation physical game and you're just getting a broken build of a game (because discs have to be produced months in advance so they often contain a barely-working build). The game gets bug fixes in the 2-3 months from when you sent the files to produce the disc and the release date which is why you get those 100GB downloads on day 1.

So for games it's not a huge deal. However, losing the digital stores holding the only copy of the binaries is a big loss. Especially since Sony just deleted everything from Studio Canal+.

The only good news is that the PSP and PS3 stores have basically been backed up by people thanks to the leaking of the master keys.
 
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