PlayStation Vita Quietly Kills Best Feature, Retro Gamers Mourn

PlayStation Vita quietly kills its best feature, and it’s a sad day for retro gamers.

Released in 2004, Sony’s PSP was a fantastic handheld console. Sure, only having one analogue stick felt very restrictive, in my opinion, but there’s no denying that it had some fantastic games. I'm thinking about God of War: Chains of Olympus, Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker and GTA: Liberty City Stories, to name a few.

Then, in 2011, we were treated to the PlayStation Vita, which was a massive visual upgrade from the PSP, essentially jumping from a PS2 standard to a PS3. The PS Vita also corrected my issue with the PSP, and that’s by having a second analogue stick.

The PS Vita also had some amazing games, such as Uncharted: Golden Abyss, Gravity Rush, Persona 4 Golden and more.

It was also a great system for indie games, with titles like Hotline Miami being many players' introduction to that series.

Sadly, Sony had seemingly lost interest in the PS Vita early in its life, at least from a first-party perspective and a lack of support led to its untimely demise.

For me, the PS Vita is one of the biggest wasted opportunities in gaming, which was essentially kept on life support thanks to the vibrant indie gaming scene.

The PS Vita Had Another Great Feature!

Much like the PSP, the PS Vita also had a really good PlayStation Store.

Not only did it have major publisher offerings and a plethora of great indie games, it was also a place where we could pick up retro games from the PS1 era.

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It’s why, to this day, I’ve not had to pay extra to play the classic Resident Evil trilogy or Dino Crisis when they became available on PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 4 via PS Plus.

The reason is that if you purchased a classic PS1 and PSP game via the PS3, PSP or PS Vita digital stores, that purchase carried over if/when a particular game came to the PlayStation Plus Premium classics library.

You can even play these classic games without an active PS Plus subscription.

PS1 and PSP Games Are No Longer on the PS Vita Store

As brought to our attention by Reddit user HollylovesPizza, a ton of classic PS1 and PSP games have been removed, including series such as the aforementioned Resident Evil, as well as Final Fantasy, seemingly overnight.

Thankfully, at least, purchased games will remain in your library and can be redownloaded, but if you fancied purchasing a classic game today, you might be out of luck.

However, some users on the thread mention that classic games are still available in some regions, but I would assume that Sony is slowly rolling out and removing games from the store.

I suppose, as great as digital games can be, with the ease of access, it’s also concerning that digital games can be instantly removed like a Thanos MCU blip.