Another June and another PlayStation keynote under my belt and yet I initially walked away from it all confused, only to have clarity on what Sony had just pulled off as I let the event sink in more. I’ll be headed to the show floor in just a few hours so I won’t make this piece awfully long but let’s briefly talk about the E3 2016 PlayStation Keynote.

Venue

Unlike past years when Sony held their PlayStation keynote at the L.A. Memorial Sports Arena, this year’s keynote took place at the Shrine Auditorium. I was a little bewildered on why Sony opted to change venues but upon a little bit of digging, the answer became pretty obvious – the Memorial Sports Arena was closed earlier this year after 57 years of operation. In its place will be a “$250 million soccer stadium, a museum, restaurants, and retail and office space.”

While I’ve been to the Shrine before, mostly notably earlier this year during the Uncovered: Final Fantasy XV event, I have to say that I’m not a huge fan. The building is absolutely beautiful and historic with plenty of seating but the location is terrible to get to. Making matters worse, outside has far less space to mingle than the Memorial Sports Arena which meant it was fine for a smaller event like Uncovered by overly crowded for a PlayStation keynote.

This unfortunately made pre-keynote, a time to mingle and catch up with old friends and colleagues, a bit cumbersome. Hopefully next year’s will be held at a better place because outside simply felt cramped.

Hardware

As I’d written before, it was a brilliant move by Andrew House (Sony Interactive Entertainment) to address rumors that Sony was indeed working on an upgraded PS4 4K hardware. This meant that unlike Microsoft which had to dedicate time at their keynote to talk vaguely about the next Xbox, Sony could purely focus on games.

I remember in years past where during their keynote, Sony not only talked about games, but talked about the PS3, PS Vita, PlayStation Move devices, and even a PlayStation-branded TV (which by the way I own and love) – and that was all at the same press conference!

This year, the only mention of hardware lasted nearly a minute where Sony confirmed PlayStation VR’s release date (October 13th). Even that served as a means to get to the reason people were really there for, which is obviously games. With the release date announcement out of the way, which frankly served as a nice focus shifter, Sony then unloaded more games on the audience with VR as their focal point.

Games

From the minute the keynote started to the minute it ended, it was all about games. Want to see God of War? How about instead of a teaser, we see gameplay. Like to be teased? Here is a Spider-Man game being developed by a close friend of PlayStation, Insomniac Games. Want surprises? Here is Hideo Kojima and an epic entrance and wait, what is that? Oh yes, a game.

And this is where my confusion, which I had mentioned earlier, is rooted. While MS earlier in the day talked about new hardware and the future of Xbox, and even Apple at WWDC unveiled all new iterations of WatchOS, MacOS, TVOS, and iOS, Sony did nothing of the sort.

There was no talk about what new PlayStation services would be coming, or graphs showing PS4 sales numbers. Heck, I don’t even think we ever saw a picture of the PS4 on any slide and that’s because outside of the one PlayStation VR slide, there were only game trailers and gameplay videos.

Instead of talking about the future of their platform which may or may not pan out as served to the audience, Sony gave its audience something more tangible and delicious – games that would be coming to PS4.

At E3 2016, Sony offered a very simple but bold message to gamers, be it if they own a PS4 or not, if you want to game, PlayStation is where you should be and to prove it, here isn’t a bunch of business-oriented slides, talk, and promise, but instead, a bunch of games that you’ll want to play.

Well done Sony and more so, congrats to the many people who make up the PlayStation family, including all those who will be attending the E3 show floor over the next three days.

Discuss:

What did you think about the E3 2016 PlayStation keynote?