Digital archivists rush to save PS3 game data before Sony shuts down the store forever in 2027 — RPCS3 emulator urges users to preserve all content

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Sony will also end disc production in 2028

RPCS3
(Image credit: RPCS3)

Yesterday, Sony revealed that the PlayStation Store will be shutting down for PS3 and PS Vita consoles in July 2027. The irony seemed to be lost on the company, pairing up a disc-killing announcement for the future of PlayStation with news that literally serves as proof of why that's a bad idea. Regardless of the rationale, digital archivists are now kicking into gear to preserve PS3 game data with whatever time they have left, and it seems like RPCS3 is leading the awareness campaign.

RPCS3 is a huge name in the emulation scene. These guys are responsible for the most prominent PS3 emulator out there right now, having recently made a breakthrough in performance for all tiers of hardware. RPCS3 is open source, so naturally the project gravitates towards a preservationist culture where everything must be protected for future generations to come.

Emulators are only as good as the software available to run on them, so these efforts are inextricably tied together. The RPCS3 team suggests using no-intro.org, which is a database that tracks everything that needs to be saved. It doesn't directly host any ROMs; rather, it hosts metadata such as cryptographic signatures (hashes like CRC32, MD5, SHA-1), exact file sizes, serial numbers, and revision histories.

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It serves as a ledger for the community, so it knows what has already been verified and backed up, and what still needs to be found before it's permanently removed from storefronts. RPCS3 is actually built around no-intro.org since it features automated integrity checks for PSN content. It can check your dumped .pkg file and tell you whether it's corrupt and precisely what's missing if it is.

For instance, to troubleshoot a niche, digital-only PS3 game that doesn't emulate well on RPCS3, the team would need to look at the original, optimized copy of the game first to understand how it should work. Since the game isn't popular, there's a high chance no one ever bothered to dump it — no-intro.org actively tries to prevent this from happening thanks to its contributors knowing exactly what to archive.

Once PSN goes down for PS3 next year, we will be at risk of losing a goldmine of content that was never preserved in its physical form. With the state of the gaming and hardware industry in general, there hasn't been a warning call like this in ages that has reminded people just how illusory an all-digital future could be.

Hardware is so expensive right now that even researchers from Google are suggesting cloud gaming as the way forward, or that leasing silicon would be more viable than buying it. PlayStation stopping disc production in 2028, with Xbox rumored to follow, means that it won't be long before ownership becomes an ephemeral concept cloaked by debates on efficiency and convenience, all while the actual art itself becomes lost media.

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Hassam Nasir
Hassam Nasir
Contributing Writer

Hassam Nasir is a die-hard hardware enthusiast with years of experience as a tech editor and writer, focusing on detailed CPU comparisons and general hardware news. When he’s not working, you’ll find him bending tubes for his ever-evolving custom water-loop gaming rig or benchmarking the latest CPUs and GPUs just for fun.

13 Comments Comment from the forums
  • bit_user
    By then, the PS3 will be like 22 years old? Long out of production. You really couldn't expect them to continue supporting it forever.

    To be honest, I'm surprised they kept it alive even this long! I have a PS3 I'd fire up every now and then and every time for the past few years I expected to see some end-of-support notice pop up, but no - the store was still there and seemed to work. The console got system software updates, even!

    Also, I want to give a little shout-out to Amazon Prime Video, who kept their streaming app for the PS3 working & supported longer than most. I last tried it about a year ago and it still worked! That helped give me the confidence to switch to a PS5, as my new streaming box. I'm sure it will continue to be supported by streaming apps for much longer than any TV I own.
    Reply
  • TerryLaze
    bit_user said:
    By then, the PS3 will be like 22 years old? Long out of production. You really couldn't expect them to continue supporting it forever.
    You could expect them to make the files part of the current store, being able to download them with your ps5 or whatever you have, as long as you still have the same account or have the credentials, and transfer them with usb or network to your ps3.
    Or even crazier make rpcs3 work on the ps5 (it already does, people installed linux on it and it can run pretty much anything) and let people that own ps3 apps on the store run them on their ps5.
    bit_user said:
    I'm sure it will continue to be supported by streaming apps for much longer than any TV I own.
    Is that even still a concern with your smartphone being able to be cast to any device as long as said device has even the most basic of android running?
    Reply
  • thestryker
    bit_user said:
    To be honest, I'm surprised they kept it alive even this long!
    I am too as I believe Microsoft shut down the 360 store a couple of years ago (though you can apparently circumvent this for backwards compatible games by buying them through the new store and they work on the 360). Since everything already attached to one's account is still available for download there isn't really a lot to be upset about here.

    Not that it's a concern for buyers, but those stores were never designed to operated for the long haul. I believe payment processing was the biggest driver for both Microsoft and Sony for killing the stores as fixing it would have required rewriting everything. I don't really think we'll see the same thing happening with the Xbox One/PS4 generation since the stores seem to be integrated with current generation and it makes sense this would continue to be the case going forward.
    Reply
  • Math Geek
    my brother has an old smart tv with outdated apps long out of support. probably 10 years old by now. it is actually nice for him since the old netflix app was before the ads and such came out. he has the basic ad supported account but that old app does not know how to play them. so he enjoys it ad free without paying for it.

    still amuses me every time i see it in running. lol
    Reply
  • eromiral
    I dont care how expensive hardware gets. I wont be streaming gaming. Luckily, i have a backlog long enough that you could cure cancer, heart disease, and stop the effects of aging and I'd still die of my seventh lightning strike before I ran out of games to play.
    Reply
  • Math Geek
    eromiral said:
    I dont care how expensive hardware gets. I wont be streaming gaming. Luckily, i have a backlog long enough that you could cure cancer, heart disease, and stop the effects of aging and I'd still die of my seventh lightning strike before I ran out of games to play.

    you and me both. and i don't even have any of those newer games that takes hundreds of hours to finish. best part is all them older games will run great on my current set-up, even 5 years from now :)
    Reply
  • salgado18
    bit_user said:
    By then, the PS3 will be like 22 years old? Long out of production. You really couldn't expect them to continue supporting it forever.

    To be honest, I'm surprised they kept it alive even this long! I have a PS3 I'd fire up every now and then and every time for the past few years I expected to see some end-of-support notice pop up, but no - the store was still there and seemed to work. The console got system software updates, even!

    Also, I want to give a little shout-out to Amazon Prime Video, who kept their streaming app for the PS3 working & supported longer than most. I last tried it about a year ago and it still worked! That helped give me the confidence to switch to a PS5, as my new streaming box. I'm sure it will continue to be supported by streaming apps for much longer than any TV I own.
    That makes me wonder what will happen with PS5 games in 22 years, since they will not be on disk.
    Reply
  • chaos215bar2
    salgado18 said:
    That makes me wonder what will happen with PS5 games in 22 years, since they will not be on disk.
    And that's precisely the point here.

    It isn't that Sony should be expected to keep a store running forever. It's that under the current IP regime, when the store does finally shut down, that's literally the end of the line for every single game available only through that store. The game is gone forever unless someone has (illegally) broken the DRM to save it.

    Every game I played in the 90s and early 00s still works just as well today as it did the day it was released. Why shouldn't this be the expectation for all games that don't absolutely require an online component for their gameplay to function?
    Reply
  • bit_user
    TerryLaze said:
    You could expect them to make the files part of the current store, being able to download them with your ps5 or whatever you have, as long as you still have the same account or have the credentials, and transfer them with usb or network to your ps3.
    Does PS3 already allow games to be transferred via USB or network? I'm just wondering how they'd ensure that the game is only transferred to a PS3 registered under the same account.

    TerryLaze said:
    Or even crazier make rpcs3 work on the ps5 (it already does, people installed linux on it and it can run pretty much anything) and let people that own ps3 apps on the store run them on their ps5.
    I doubt the distribution agreement they have with publishers would cover that.

    TerryLaze said:
    Is that even still a concern with your smartphone being able to be cast to any device as long as said device has even the most basic of android running?
    The one time I tried to cast from my Android phone (to a HiSense TV), it didn't work. I got a type-C to HDMI cable and that worked, but not perfectly and I don't consider either method to be as good as streaming on my TV or PS5.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    Math Geek said:
    my brother has an old smart tv with outdated apps long out of support. probably 10 years old by now. it is actually nice for him since the old netflix app was before the ads and such came out. he has the basic ad supported account but that old app does not know how to play them. so he enjoys it ad free without paying for it.
    Well, when Amazon and Hulu dropped support for my smart TV, the apps just disappeared from the home screen. No way to run them. When Hulu dropped support for the PS3, you just got an error message when you'd try to run the Hulu app on it.
    Reply