Anyone else getting error code 80029509 when trying to download software?
Luckily for me, my brother in law left his super slim while he is travelling. It’s actually kinda busted in that the Bluetooth and wifi chip doesn’t work but it works with a wired connection which is good enough to make some purchases.
Basically some young professionals at Sony have made the business decision to shutter this without fully understanding the impact.
I’ll never buy Sony again.
So I went to buy Minecraft PS Vita Edition from the Australian store and it won’t let me add funds to my wallet. A quick google shows Europe got cut off at the start of the year but that’s a different continent. Anyone from Australia still able to add funds directly on their Vita with their credit card?
Edit: Looks like you can add them at the website store.playstation.com but I tried twice and it errors out. I’m going to leave it for now just in case they both end up going through.
I would speculate that this was a top-down decision. The biggest reason to make this decision probably isn’t server costs like one would expect. I bet it’s instead to not have to train support people how to deal with PS3 and Vita purchase inquiries going forward. Because I genuinely can’t imagine that it costs a whole lot to run these servers.
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Yes, I saw the writing on the wall with the PS4. The botching of the PS1 classic. The comments on PS1 games by the new CEO. They do not care about their legacy.
Sony is only for first party and exclusives.
It makes the whole brand feel a bit… disposable? I don’t know. For some reason it’s rubbing me the wrong way more than the Wii and DSi shutdowns did.
Because, like it or not, Nintendo takes great effort to keep their older games in spotlight. Yeah, their decisions can be controversial. Full priced remasters for example. But it keeps their classics in print. And new generations can keep discovering them.
This is why the Smash series has worked as well. While Sony’s version just felt like a mismash, quality of the that game aside.
Server costs are one thing. There are also maintenance costs; you need to have people update servers pretty well continuously, and there are liability considerations if you run an insecure service.
I can’t really speak about Sony but part of my job is doing minimal-work maintenance for an old Java system that hasn’t really seen much love for about 5 years. I spend a few weeks every quarter, plus part of the time of a DevOps person, plus a couple weeks of QA time. Just that effort likely costs around 50k of spend per year, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the work for PS3/PSVita store is 5x that.
The other problem is every time we go to update this system it gets more risky. We’re using old java libraries that hopefully have updates when security vulnerabilities are found. If they don’t, we’re screwed. If the updates break things, we’re screwed. If the updates available have some crazy new paradigm that requires a big re-write (happens a LOT), we’re screwed. The more complex a system + the more dependencies the more likely you run into these “we’re screwed” moments. What if all this stuff is fragile enough that even upgrading to a new server OS is a big pain?
Maybe you think 250k annually (my dumb guess above) isn’t a lot of spend. Consider too that the PS Stores handle credit card transactions. That means they’re in PCI scope, and if they have a vulnerability that leaves Sony liable in the case of credit card fraud resulting from their mistakes. The risk of a mistake or an insecure system costing them is a big consideration.
Howabout talent retention? Nobody really wants to be the one stuck applying patches to a system indefinitely. If you have an engineer that worked on PSN 8 years ago during their last big store overhaul on PS3 what are the odds they want to be asked to continue doing this maintenance work. Hire someone right out of school? They’d get bored and quit.
IDK about the situation at Sony but my team has been pushing to shut down our legacy system for quite some time, and it’s very bottom up. Execs would rather just keep it on. 
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Stop giving me doses of reality. I just want to complain with impunity. 
Seriously though, you’re most likely correct about all of that.
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It’s all just speculation on our part since we don’t have the inside info…but I work for a very large international retail company and 250k/year is, truly, chump change. It’s the cost of 1 director’s salary - and there are thousands of them spread out around the globe. Payment systems are a legitimate concern, but when you’re already maintaining one for PS5 sales, extending that for other applications is trivial. From my perspective, all of this would be very easy and cheap for Sony to maintain, even if it wasn’t a huge profit center and they did it purely out of “good will” and respect for their platform. Unless someone leaks exec board minutes that lays out exactly why they need to do this, I will continue to see this as simply short-sighted penny-pinching.
I think you’re 100% right about this. It’s likely about two things: the energy and focus of employees and human capital (these systems don’t just run themselves) and the increasing likelihood that a legacy system like this could be vulnerable to bad actors. Remember that the PSN attack of 2011 (nearly 10 years ago to the day now) was one of the largest and most costly such hacks ever at the time. Probably still, I dunno. And if you say, “Well, yeah, then just make sure it’s secure!” than I would refer you to my first point.
To be clear, I think it’s bullshit and short sighted that they don’t find SOME way to retain legacy content. But I can see why they’d be eager to offload this legacy delivery system. As many have said, no one should be surprised if they eventually try to sell us this content all over again … I mean they HAVE to be looking at the kind of money Nintendo continues to pull down doing exactly that.
I and everybody I know in tech, even tangentially, can relate to this. Legacy support can be a lead weight that holds so much back and yet it is still less a hassle at times than getting a workforce, or even individual person, to understand any kind of change.
However it would make me feel a ton better for them to dump everything in the past if the new store was actually good and looked like it was built to last. Sure I can’t see the backend on it but I don’t really have a lot of faith in them.
All of this post is reality and I know no one wants to hear it but saying keeping old stores open is “trivial” is a pie in the sky ideal.
Here’s an example many of you may understand… remember how we all wanted more games in 2D when Saturn gave us high quality home hardware for it but almost every developer on earth only wanted to make and sell rudimentary 3D games because that was the hot new tech? That’s how it works behind the scenes with any new software.
Toss in PCI compliance and constant hardening of servers from outside attack (and believe me, those PS3 servers have to be among their most vulnerable ways in right now) and you have a recipe for shutdown. It simply can’t last forever.
As long as we can redownload and authenticate for our purchased content for said redownloads, this is how it has to be.
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I understand the need to come to terms with something that’s unpleasant, but this is trivial. I’m a deeply private person and I’m not about to start flashing my credentials all over the Internet just to prove a point, but these are problems we solved years ago. And if Sony doesn’t want to bother with running the operations internally, they could outsource the whole thing to a third party - something common and easy to do.
Everyone is free to think/believe what they’d like, but my main point is that these are choices and Sony is in no way forced down this path. This is not how it has to be and we should expect better as customers. Given the way they’ve approached the topic so far, I fully expect the downloads to go away in the not-so-distant future, too.
Honestly, PlayStation really should have seen this coming for many of the reasons points out already, and planned for this demise in the best way possible. Due to a lack of foresight they are instead only clearing the lowest of bars.
With the Vita they made sure to bring over the library of PS1 and PC Engine Archives, as well as any PSP games that were catalogued on the PS Store. But the Vita was seen as a legacy platform by SCEA over five years ago, and its library has been left for dead.
PS4’s codename was PS Orbis, and ‘Orbis Vita’ means circle of life. It’s in the same generation as the Vita as far as I’m concerned, yet it didn’t get the same treatment with regards to the heritage of software. They even stripped out the CD laser so you wouldn’t be able to play PS1 discs even if they did write an emulator for PS4.
It was the PS4, however, that ended up being a roaring success, with its library brought forward to the PS5 (which itself is more like a PS4 Pro Max). If Sony made an effort to preserve as much of the old PS Store library as possible on PS5, we might not be so bothered by this, a bit like how the DSiWare library was ported to 3DS eShop.
I get the impression the strategies crafted for the Vita largely came from SCEJ in Japan while those for the PS4 came from SCEA in America, who have traditionally shown a disregard for old games (e.g. they had a policy banning PS1 rereleases on PSP UMD). It speaks volumes that PS1 Archives was significantly better supported in Japan, with a steady stream of releases through to the end of 2019, but the new centrally run Sony Interactive Entertainment wouldn’t care about such a small piece of the market. SCEJ in the past did, however, even stating in old interviews that courting otome games were important to them even though they are a niche.
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Just a heads up, I think it’s worth checking the prices of Vita physical games on eBay against the prices listed on the web store. I assumed everything would be more expensive on eBay but there are similarly priced games like Freedom Wars or even cheaper like Borderlands 2 (I know it’s a bad port but still).
Think I’ll lean towards physical cards if available to save on card space (already filled my 32GB) unless the price is similar or cheaper than in the store.
Of the games set to disappear from the formats, the vast majority are available on other platforms such as older PlayStation consoles or PC. However, around 120 games will essentially become lost forever once the stores close, our analysis suggests.
Well… it would’ve been nice to provide the names of those 120 games.
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Yep, I agree, would make it easier. We all know House of the Dead 4 is one of those games.