Oof. Ok yeah, that's really shitty. I can understand closing the Vita store with little warning. That's fine. People should have known it was going to be closed sooner than later. But selling people dev kits, just a month ago, while still closing the store? Sony really needs to just dial their closure date back by a year to give these devs time to finish and release their games. Either that or refund them for the Dev Kit, and the time they spent developing for Vita + lost sales.

Jim Sterling has a point here. If a game is no longer available to buy legally, pirate away. Also, Jim Ryan has made way too many stupid decisions in the last year or two with PS.

Finally, I'd like to point out that Nintendo has a nice little habit of not preserving their games, and then offering them up to people for a full $60 years later. The best part? Nintendo fanboys like to defend lazy ports as "New Games", whenever Nintendo's release schedule becomes too light. Fuck off. I already played SM64 multiple times in my life. It's not a new game, and I have zero interest in going back to it ever. And even if I did, I'd own an N64 for that.

I've always maintained that If video game companies aren't giving people legitimate ways to purchase certain games, then it's perfectly fine to find other ways to play them, from piracy to emulation. There are tons of older games on platforms like the NES, SNES, PS1 and PS2 that aren't available anywhere for purchase legally, which to me signals that it's perfectly fine to get those games through other means.

Pie on your face. - You didn't read the article did you?

Yes I already said Sony was wrong in doing it, but also think they had reason for not giving a lot of head room warning (leaks). And yes Sony should amend it by at least refunding the kits and perhaps giving some penalty money to pay back the money they put on deving already.

I agree with you and Sony didn't give a good explanation (or how much it saves money), my point was just that when something isn't doing profit it doesn't get support from vendor.

Agree. I don't even consider it piracy if there is no legal way to acquire it from original vendor, since if it is only available second hand them devs get no money.

You mean this one? https://www.thegamer.com/ps3-vita-psp-stores-permanently-closed/ That's the article that OP linked to and it doesn't say anything about dev kits being sold last minute.

It's not that simple though. For all we know, this could significantly simplify the codebase that handles purchasing content on Store. Offering PS3 and Vita games on the new Store (remember, it was redesigned fairly recently) would require new work to be done, which takes effort and costs money for what is probably fairly little benefit at this point. Unless some questionable design choices have been made in the past (which is entirely possible) that make this more beneficial than we could imagine, I don't personally think this seems like a good call on Sony's part, but it seems Sony doesn't see much value in supporting legacy systems and wants to fully focus on newer systems.

Also, this makes it easier for Sony to eventually kill PS3 and Vita downloads as well, if and probably when they decide to do so. Allowing people to purchase new content until the moment even downloads are killed would look quite bad, but first killing the ability to purchase new content and only later killing the downloads makes it seem like a smaller deal because this way you can't purchase a game one day and not be able to download it the next day. Of course this is still bad, but it doesn't seem quite as bad.

It's not hard to find.  It's on the front page of this site, along with a link to the IGN article actually:

https://www.vgchartz.com/article/448178/some-ps-vita-devs-werent-warned-about-ps-store-closure/

Several developers have spoken with IGN and revealed they were not given a proper warning from Sony about the PlayStation Store closure. 

Lillymo Games' Barry Johnson told IGN the studio was "not warned about the closing of the Vita store in any way" and the team bought a second PlayStation Vita devkit last month. 

"When word came out that it was happening through that story at TheGamer we reached out to Sony for clarification and were given no response," said Johnson. "We found out at the same time as the public did that we would have to cancel our Vita version of our next game."

https://www.ign.com/articles/some-ps-vita-developers-werent-properly-warned-the-psn-store-would-close

In a DM to IGN, Barry Johnson from Lillymo Games says that the studio was “not warned about the closing of the Vita store in any way.” In fact, Johnson says they purchased a second Vita devkit just last month.

Most articles on this site are lazily put together, not newsworthy, and little more than a headline. Don't get me wrong. WDA does a great job with the sales charts, but I stopped reading his other "articles" ages ago.

The store will remain open