Sony has made it nearly impossible to buy PS3 games online
Sony has made it almost incommunicable to buy PS3 games online
Update: Nintendo plans to shut downwards the 3DS and Wii U eShops in 2023, leading to another video game preservation calamity
If yous've already played everything you want to play on the PS3, consider yourself lucky. Sony's system from ii panel generations agone still has an first-class game library. But you'd never know it, because how many hoops you take to jump through earlier y'all can access it. Afterward letting my PS3 gather dust for the last few years, I decided information technology was fourth dimension to give the panel another spin. After an hour of grappling with — and barely defeating — the primitive interface and arcane restrictions, I almost wish I hadn't.
At that place are yet lots of worthwhile games to buy on PS3. And if you can't find them in a used games store or on eBay, buying them digitally is withal technically an option. Merely if you go down that path, you should exist prepared for a lot of frustration along the mode.
A stay of execution
Longtime Tom'due south Guide readers may remember that there was a big to-practise most the PS3's online store last year. Sony threatened to shut the whole matter down, because the company wanted to focus more than attention on selling PS4 and PS5 games. After a calendar month of fan backlash, Sony agreed to go along operations for the PlayStation Store on PS3 and PS Vita, although the PSP'southward online store was (mostly) doomed.
The only event is that these deprecated panel stores required some compromises to proceed adrift. Dissimilar the PS4 and PS5, buying games on the PS3 has a number of inconvenient restrictions:
- Y'all must buy games via the console itself, non a Web browser
- Yous must preload the funds you need into your account
- Y'all can download a game simply from its store list, non via a Web browser or app
These may not sound like huge inconveniences. In fact, if the PlayStation Shop worked perfectly on the PS3, they wouldn't exist. Only each footstep of the procedure compounds on itself to create a vortex of unpleasantness, dragging out a five-minute process into an hours-long odyssey.
The setup for my story is simple. I have nothing pressing to play at the moment, and I've been slowly but surely working my way through the excellent Yakuza series. While almost of these games are bachelor on modern consoles, the questionable spinoff, Yakuza: Expressionless Souls, is relegated to the PS3. It's not supposed to be a great game, but I'm invested enough in the franchise to meet what it has to offering. Equally physical copies of the game go for up of $lxxx on eBay, the $twenty digital copy looked much more than tempting.
Don't need no credit card
In retrospect, I should have foreseen that this would be a difficult process when I booted up my PS3 and plant that the PlayStation Shop refused to load. This, I discovered, was due to my organization's clock being set to the wrong time, as the PS3 does not automatically accommodate for Daylight Savings. This was likewise the easiest part of the process to right, requiring but one trip through an obscure serial of menus.
Next, I had to find the game in the PS Store. Unlike the PS4, PS5 and Web stores, the PS3 uses an antiquated system that forces you to select i letter at a time, rather than only typing out a game's name on a keyboard. This is about as tedious as information technology sounds.
Subsequently adding the game to my cart, I attempted to check out. When you start log into the PS3's store, a notice reminds you that credit cards and PayPal don't piece of work, and that yous'll accept to add funds via either smartphone or PC. Since I had advance warning, I couldn't be also upset about this, but it'southward nevertheless an actress complexity in an already complicated process.
I hopped onto my smartphone and logged into the PlayStation Store. Adding funds is not the most straightforward process to begin with, since the link that the PS3 shop gives you doesn't actually accept you to the "add funds" page — information technology's just a two-step tutorial on how to do so. The bodily option to add funds is buried in your account profile under Payment Direction.
Calculation funds is not a straightforward process, either. You can't merely price out the game yous want to buy and type in the exact price. Instead, you have to add funds in increments of $5, $10, $25, $l or $60. If your game costs, say, $21, as mine did, you'll take to live with four useless dollars bottleneck upward your PSN business relationship until you buy even more stuff. It's an former, cheap trick to lock you into a digital ecosystem.
Fifty-fifty less straightforward were the inexplicable error messages I got when I tried to actually add funds. My credit card had an error; my PayPal had an error. I checked to make certain that Sony servers were running properly, but everything was in order. I decided that, perhaps, my PC would be a better option. Merely after logging in and attempting to add funds via both credit bill of fare and PayPal again, I got the exact same message: "An mistake has occurred. Please attempt again."
At this point, my only recourse was to get online and see if other people had the aforementioned problem. I had 2 options: I could buy a PSN gift bill of fare and hope for the best, or I could attempt to add funds on a PS4 or PS5. Wanting to cut out the middleman, I booted up my PS5 and hopped into the PlayStation Shop.
Except, equally I discovered, you can't add funds in the PlayStation Store — y'all have to dive deep into your account menu from the PS5'due south dwelling house screen. It's an unintuitive process from get-go to end, but at least it (somewhat inexplicably) worked. At last, I had $25 in my PSN wallet.
That was the end of my payment difficulties, but a few more hurdles even so stood between Yakuza: Dead Souls and me. After I finally bought the game, I selected the Download choice, only to exist informed that I didn't have enough space — 20 GB, to be precise.
This office was, possibly, understandable. I've had the PS3 for more a decade, and had never really culled my game library. I took a few minutes to uninstall all of my digital games, securing 21 GB of free space overall. I went back to the PS Shop, where I learned that my 21 GB of free space wasn't enough to install a 20 GB game.
This necessitated another trip to the Cyberspace assist forums. It turns out that every PlayStation game requires twice as much space to install (or to update) equally it actually needs to run, due to redundancies in the installation process. In authenticity, I needed 40 GB of infinite to install a 20 GB game, on a system with fourscore GB of total storage space. The PS3'due south online store never explains this part of the process, leaving yous to approximate how much space you lot'll actually need to free up.
At this point, I had to navigate into the PS3's Game Data Utility menu, which had large installation files from every PS3 game I'd ever played. I had to delete all this data — simply it was admittedly vital that I did not touch the Saved Information Utility card, located directly next to Game Data Utility, as this would have deleted all of my save files instead. Some of the installation data became corrupted while I was attempting to delete it, which necessitated a total console reboot.
At last, more than an hour afterwards I first attempted to purchase the game, I could begin the process of downloading Yakuza: Expressionless Souls onto my PS3. Due to the console's antiquated Wi-Fi connection, the process would take nigh four hours. I turned off my organization and went to bed.
Game preservation
When Sony offset announced the PS3 store shutdown, I argued that such practices were counterproductive for game preservation. Without rehashing my whole argument, older games are already hard to play, and removing them from digital stores makes it that much harder. While it's beauteous that we can still buy and download PS3 games, the process is so convoluted that I can't imagine many people would desire to.
To be fair, Sony has simply so many resources, and it makes more than sense to funnel those resource toward systems that people are really using on a day-to-solar day basis. Even in its current, deprecated grade, the PS3 store does take time, attempt and money to maintain. Information technology would crave even more time, coin and attempt to make the experience meaningfully ameliorate.
And yet, people are still buying and playing old games, if the outcry against the PS3/Vita/PSP store closures was anything to go by. If manufacturers tin't commit whatsoever resources into making this process better, so at the very least, they should effort to ensure that it doesn't get worse.
Source: https://www.tomsguide.com/opinion/buy-ps3-games-online
Posted by: richardsonfander.blogspot.com
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