- Primary Subject: PS3 Games
- Key Update: Sony is phasing out the PlayStation Store for PS3 and PS Vita, with regional shutdowns starting August 2026 and a full global closure expected by July 2027.
- Status: Confirmed
- Last Verified: July 7, 2026
- Quick Answer: Sony is closing the PS3 and PS Vita PlayStation Store in stages through 2026 and 2027, ending new digital purchases while allowing previously bought games to remain downloadable.
The end of the PlayStation Store on PS3 and PS Vita is now officially on the calendar.
Sony will begin closing the storefront in select markets in August 2026 before expanding the shutdown later in the year and completing it worldwide in July 2027.
Once that happens, new purchases will no longer be possible, although anything already tied to an account will remain available to download for the foreseeable future.
That takes some of the immediate pressure off, although the window to buy anything new is still closing.
The PS3's digital library was full of the sort of games that could easily slip through the cracks, from strange experiments and smaller spin-offs to one-off ideas that never found their way to another platform.
The console's biggest releases are not the ones I am worried about. Most of those can still be found on disc or have already been remastered elsewhere.
It is the games with no obvious way out of the PS3 that I would be looking at now.
I would not recommend panic-buying every obscure game simply because it might become unavailable.
Scarcity does not magically make a mediocre game worth owning, and I have no interest in telling anyone to fill a hard drive with things they will never play.
If I were choosing only six games to secure before the PS3 store closes, these are the ones I would buy first.
Tokyo Jungle
If there is one game I would put at the top of any PS3 shopping list, it is Tokyo Jungle.
The PS3 had no shortage of strange games, but even by its standards, surviving an abandoned Tokyo as everything from a Pomeranian to a dinosaur is difficult to beat.
You might begin as a Pomeranian scrambling for food and trying not to become somebody else's lunch.
Keep going, however, and the game opens into an increasingly absurd ecosystem filled with predators, prey and animals that have no business roaming the streets of Tokyo.
Survival means hunting, avoiding stronger creatures, finding a mate and passing your progress to another generation.
It is part survival game, part roguelike and unlike almost anything else Sony has ever published.
I miss the kind of industry that could hear the pitch for Tokyo Jungle and decide, for whatever reason, that this was a game worth making.
Modern development has not completely lost that spirit, of course, but I struggle to imagine many major publishers today hearing "post-apocalyptic animal survival game starring a Pomeranian" and immediately reaching for the company credit card.
inFamous: Festival of Blood
Festival of Blood is the kind of downloadable spin-off I miss.
Sucker Punch took the world and mechanics of inFamous 2, turned Cole MacGrath into a vampire and built a compact standalone adventure around the idea.
That is basically the pitch, and I like the game more for not overcomplicating it.
Festival of Blood takes place over a single night in New Marais, with Cole infected by a vampire and racing to defeat Bloody Mary before sunrise.
The supernatural premise gives his familiar electrical powers a different flavour, including the ability to transform into a swarm of bats and fly across the city (which is every bit as entertaining as it sounds).
It is not an enormous game, nor does it need to be. One of the things I miss about this period is how willing publishers were to release smaller projects that played with an established series without needing to justify themselves as full-priced sequels.
Festival of Blood could be weird, brief and self-contained because nobody expected it to support five years of seasonal content or become the beginning of a multimedia universe.
Super Stardust HD
Long before Returnal became its breakout hit, Housemarque had already mastered this kind of arcade action on PlayStation.
Super Stardust HD is one of the clearest examples, and I think it remains one of the easiest games on this list to pick up and immediately understand.
The setup is beautifully straightforward. You pilot a small ship around spherical planets, blasting through waves of asteroids and enemies while switching between weapons suited to different threats.
It sounds simple because it is simple, at least until the screen begins filling with debris, projectiles and increasingly aggressive enemies, and the whole thing turns into the sort of controlled panic Housemarque has always understood exceptionally well.
There is very little friction between starting a run and becoming completely absorbed in it.
The controls make sense immediately, and every failure leaves me with one small thing I am certain I can improve next time.
I can also see the foundations of the developer Housemarque would eventually become.
The love of particles, the two-stick precision and the ability to make chaos readable were all there long before Returnal introduced the studio to a much larger audience.
Jet Set Radio
Jet Set Radio arrived long before the PS3, but that does not make its HD release any less deserving of a recommendation.
Some games become easier to appreciate with age, and Sega's graffiti-soaked skating game has somehow become more distinctive as the industry around it has changed.
You skate through a stylised city, grind across rails, tag walls and evade increasingly ridiculous authorities, all while one of gaming's most recognisable soundtracks keeps everything moving.
The controls can show their age, particularly if you come to it expecting the smoothness of a modern skating game, but the visual identity has barely aged at all.
There are games released this year that would love to have half as much personality. I also find its influence much easier to see now.
Games such as Bomb Rush Cyberfunk have carried that spirit forward, but the original remains worth playing because so much of its appeal comes from the specific combination of art, music and turn-of-the-century Sega confidence.
Drakengard 3
Drakengard 3 is not the easiest game here to recommend, which is partly why I want it on this list.
Its performance on PS3 can be rough, its combat is uneven and anyone expecting the polish of NieR: Automata will quickly discover that Yoko Taro's earlier work came with considerably more visible seams.
I still find it fascinating. The game follows Zero, an Intoner determined to kill her five sisters, accompanied by a dragon and a rotating cast of deeply strange companions.
Explaining much more risks flattening a story that is better experienced as it becomes increasingly violent, funny, uncomfortable and emotionally complicated.
Drakengard 3 is messy in ways that can be frustrating, but it is also unmistakably the work of a creator with ideas he was determined to pursue.
If you have any interest in Yoko Taro's work and want to see the strange road that eventually led to NieR's modern success, I would not leave this one until the last minute.
Yakuza: Dead Souls
Yakuza is bigger than it has ever been, which makes it odd that one of the series’ wildest experiments is still stranded on the PS3.
Yakuza: Dead Souls takes Kamurocho, fills it with zombies and hands its familiar cast a collection of guns.
Yakuza has done plenty of things better, and so has the zombie genre, but neither fact makes me any less willing to recommend Dead Souls.
Dead Souls belongs to a category of spin-off I have a particular weakness for, which is the kind that treats an established series like a box of toys.
Kiryu, Majima and the rest of the cast are dropped into an outbreak that has very little interest in fitting neatly into the main continuity, allowing the game to indulge in the sort of nonsense that would be difficult to sustain across a regular entry.
It is clunky, excessive and frequently ridiculous (Majima during a zombie apocalypse is about as subtle as you would expect), but I think it is more memorable for all of it.
I also think the game has become more interesting as Yakuza has grown.
A strange detour for a relatively niche series at the time, it now feels like a conspicuous gap in one of gaming's biggest franchises.
You can work through remakes and remasters of most major entries on modern hardware, then reach Dead Souls and discover that there is still no convenient modern version waiting for you.
You can still find Dead Souls on disc, so it is hardly the most endangered game here, but I would not ignore the digital version while it remains available.
Sony has given us time, which is better than waking up one morning to discover the store has already disappeared.
Still, July 2027 will arrive eventually, and once it does, the chance to add anything new to your PS3 library will be gone.
I do not think a game becomes worth owning simply because it is about to disappear.
I would recommend these six even if the PS3 store were staying open for another decade.
They are inventive, influential, wonderfully strange or attached to parts of PlayStation history that newer hardware has failed to carry forward.
If the PS3 era has to end, these are the six I would make sure came with me.
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