Statement from @PN_Jon about the future of Pretendo Network:
Hey everyone! As you all know, Pretendo Network has been a passion project for many of us for years. For myself, it was definitely a dream come true to work on what I love for so long. Our team has spent thousands of hours with these consoles and games, pouring years of tears, blood, and keyboards into their research and development.
But as the saying goes, all things must come to an end. We believe that Pretendo Network has hit it’s peak, there is not really anything left for us to add. And so we have made the decision to move on to our next stages in life.
Introducing: Phony!
Phony is a new server emulation project founded by same team who brought you Pretendo Network, only this time for PSN on the PlayStation 3 and PS Vita! With this new project, we hope to breathe life into a whole new set of consoles on a new platform! Phony will support many features out of the gate, including custom PSN accounts, new trophies in your favorite games, and of course online play in games whose servers have been shut down. We hope to see you join us on this new journey!
https://phony.network/
Check the date. Do it.
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Wooo! I’m so excited to play Little Big Planet 2 and my favorite Vita titles online with friends! This was a great choice for The Platform Previously Known As Pretendo. No one plays Nintendo hardware anymore, too childish.
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I got an ad but hopefully I can enjoy the beauty of the phony network yt video! I hope to never give this up
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so question will beta servers stay in beta?
Noeta of course xd because it’s made my the same people
Jon has made a follow up announcement, I will unpin this shortly:
TLDR: Pretendo is not going anywhere, check your calendars
Enough time has passed and there’s been some confusion, so let me clear a few things up:
- This was for April Fools. I’m in the EST timezone, so I sent it at midnight my time, which is why it may not have been April 1st for some of you
- No, Pretendo is NOT going anywhere. That was part of the bit. We will continue to work as normal and we have no plans to shut down
You may have noticed I didn’t mention Phony in there, and that’s intended. Because Phony is actually real, and this was a tease (good job to everyone who sniffed that out in #pretendo!) 
we’ve been playing around with PSN for real hardware PS3s/Vitas for almost a year now
Let me clear a few things up though:
- It’s a side thing. We only touch it in our free time, and only a tiny subset of our team is even interested in it right now. Pretendo Network is still, and will continue to be for the foreseeable future, the priority of this team
- Do not expect anything any time soon, or at all. It’s all highly work-in-progress. It’s mostly just a bunch of experiments seeing what can and can’t work. Tests for things like accounts, custom trophies, etc. Almost everything is hard-coded for a specific test, we don’t have any unified codebase for this yet (hell, we’ve been using PNIDs as test accounts to fake authentication). And all of this could be canned. Don’t get your hopes up, and temper expectations
- We’re only focussing on the PS3 and Vita. I’ve looked into the original PSP a bit but we determined that it wouldn’t be useful. The PS4/PS5 are still active platforms for Sony, and use a paid-online model, so we do not want to step on any toes there
You likely won’t see anything related to Phony for a long time after this, like I said this was supposed to be a tease about a side thing we’re dabbling in when we have some free time or just want a change of pace. Hopefully though, we do end up with something for you in the future 
For now, enjoy these teasing screenshots
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this is insane… I’m hyped…
Please, let Phony be a real thing it’s too good to ignore-
