A list of random PS3 games can no longer be patched
The nightmare days for PS3 players continue.
Sony announced at the end of March that it'll be shutting down digital stores for PS3, Vita and PSP over the course of the summer, beginning July 2.
This shutdown should not affect players who already own digital games, as Sony confirmed they'll continue to be able to download them in the future. Unfortunately, for a few games at least, they're not grabbing their latest patches.
It's not clear whether this is related to Sony's imminent shutdown of the PS3 PlayStation Store, but a number of PSNProfiles forum users have been putting together an updated list of games that, for one reason or another, do not download their most recent patches.
According to reports (via ResetEra), the affected games do not download their patches, even when forced to do so through the check for update feature. Users have also tried launching affected games, which should also force the download, but the download never starts.
The listed games appear to exhibit these problems in some regions but not others. Many have this problem in North America, for instance, but not Europe. In some cases, only the disc version is affected, whereas it's a digital-only problem in others.
These aren't some random niche games, either. The list so far includes names like Battlefield 4, Castlevania: Lords of Shadow, Gran Turismo 5, LittleBigPlanet Game of the Year Edition, Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2, SoulCalibur 4, Street Fighter 3 3rd Strike Online Edition and several others. A number of anime games are also affected, when installed from a disc, such as several Dragon Ball, One Piece, Naruto Shippuden and Fist of the North Star games.
It goes without saying that patches are extremely important for games, particularly those whose Trophies do not unlock without their patches. For online games, having the most updated version is the only way to play online, something you won't be able to do if there's no way to grab the latest patch.
This is more than likely a bug, as there's no consistent pattern to detect here. Though Sony did promise to keep servers online for the foreseeable future, allowing players to re-download their owned games, this incident nonetheless causes further mistrust of the company.
Many are now preparing for the worst, downloading their favourite games and patching them while they could, particularly those whose post-launch updates made dramatical differences to the way they install or play.