PlayStation 3 Classics Return As Sony Backs Away From Physical Media

Jul 10, 2026 - 07:11

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PlayStation 3 Classics Return As Sony Backs Away From Physical Media

The PlayStation 3 Console and Controller in front of a blue background.

Published Jul 9, 2026, 11:00 PM EDT

Tom Wilson is a Gaming Features Writer at Screen Rant. Over the past five years, Tom has worked as the Editor-in-Chief at The Game Crater, as a Staff Writer for GamingIntel, a List Writer at TheGamer, and, of course, as a Senior Writer at ScreenRant. Tom has experience writing reviews, guides, news, and features, and has been responsible for teams of writers, training them and editing their work.

Tom graduated with a Masters in Multimedia Journalism, and has since gone on to build up his portfolio of games journalism work.

Sony has been making a lot of questionable decisions as of late, the majority of which has seemingly alienated a large swathe of its fanbase and pushed users to reflect fondly on the bygone eras of the PlayStation 3 and before. Of course, as great as those earlier consoles were, obtaining a lot of the thousands of games released for them can be tricky, especially as the digital storefront of the PlayStation 3 was recently shuttered, and several physical copies are rare oddities already bound to a handful of collectors.

This is proving to be a somewhat frustrating issue for fans looking to return to the glory days of the PS3 specifically, especially in the face of Sony's controversial move to abandon PlayStation physical games. Fortunately, a brand-new project is giving PS3 games a new lease of life, making them easier to access than ever before, and even improving them, bringing several of them in-line with their other console counterparts, or, on some occasions, making them even better.

Image shows Joel and Ellie in The Last of Us

The PlayStation 3 was a rather tricky console to port or even develop games for due to its controversial, overly complex, and occasionally inferior Cell Broadband Engine processor. It meant that, every so often, games played worse on the PS3 than they did on other platforms. It has also ensured that emulating such games is tricky, with even the very best PS3 emulators out there only managing to emulate around 70% of the total library. Even some of the greatest PS3 games of all time remain unplayable now outside rare and prohibitively expensive physical copies.

Fortunately, that is all changing, as the PS3 is getting its very own recompiler tool called ps3recomp. Whereas before, fans had to emulate any PS3 game they wanted to play and suffer through the numerous issues that came with that, ps3recomp ostensibly does the opposite by turning existing PlayStation 3 game files into PC executables. This has numerous key advantages over standard emulation, as it widens the pool of available games, improves preservation as the native PC executables aren't reliant on emulators that can disappear, and also improves performance across the board.

A group of soldiers gathered around a vehicle in Killzone 2.

The tool, which is available on GitHub, will give new life to a lot of potentially lost or unplayable PS3 games, something that comes as a huge win after the PlayStation 3 digital storefront was closed in early July. Now, games that ran poorly due to the complex nature of the Cell Broadband Engine processor will be given a boost, and previously inaccessible titles will become available. It's a significant step forward for the PlayStation 3 community, and perfectly timed for those eager to return to a much better (and frankly underrated) era in Sony's lifespan.

Recompiler tools like ps3recomp exist already for other systems, but putting together a PS3 one has proven challenging for the aforementioned reasons. Fortunately, it exists now, and will only get better as time goes on. It'll take a while to recompile every PS3 game into a native PC executable, but once it's done, fans can rest assured that their favorite obscure title is playable and preserved forever. Sure, the PlayStation 3 had its fair share of problems, but many of its games are still absolutely worth playing today, and is absolutely deserving of a second chance.