Downloads Aren't Forever

It's a bad time to be a Playstation owner, it would seem.

Bryan "The Gay Gamer" Ochalla caught this alarming rumor from Wario64, a typically reliable source for gaming news. It seems Sony will shut down the online stores for the PSP, PS3, and Playstation Vita as soon as late summer of this year. What this means is that if you've purchased a game for any of these systems online and it's lost in a hard drive crash or some other mishap, you won't be getting it back after August. While you can back up PSP and Vita games to your PC using Sony's Content Manager Assistant, I don't know of any similar tools for the Playstation 3... not that games spanning twenty five gigabytes or more would be all that convenient to archive anyway.

But wait, it gets better! There's another report, this time from Does It Play, that the Playstation 4 is built with a CMOS battery that will make a C-MESS out of both your downloaded and physical games after it eventually dies. You'll have to get online to verify the ownership of your downloaded content after the battery kicks the bucket, and your disc-based games won't run at all. Yes, even if you had the foresight to buy physical copies of PS4 games, they won't help you much once the system's internal battery runs dry. 

If you thought that was a stunning revelation, just wait until you hear that the Philips CD-i first released thirty years ago has a similar problem with a cantankerous coin battery. Playstation 4, CD-i am your father!

image from Morbotron

Between the possibility of legally obtained Playstation games making a vanishing act from your systems and the news that transferring saves from the PS4 to the PS5 is a Scanners-level headache, I'm feeling a lot more confident about my purchase of an Xbox One. Sure I haven't been playing games much on it lately, but those games will be there for me when I eventually get back to them. Whenever that is.