Earlier today, the second annual PlayStation Experience keynote kicked off, designed to headline PlayStation exclusive content and build more excitement around the brand prior the ever important holiday shopping season. While hard to follow up with what many would arguably call the best E3, PlayStation Experience had enough content to hold its own. From Destiny Sparrow Racing League to Ni no Kuni II: Revenant Kingdom and a plethora of games for PlayStation VR and PlayStation Vita (remember that thing?), there was plenty to be seen at PSX.

But games aren’t the topic of discussion for this article and instead Sony’s own business is. Despite leading a multi-billion dollar industry, PlayStation Experience perhaps best showed the infrastructure immaturity of PlayStation and its inability to deliver on scale. As games mature and expand beyond what you do in your basement to cutting edge graphics, design, and now virtual reality, the mechanism on how they are presented remains archaic at best and Sony is a huge culprit. Let me explain.

How the hell do I watch this thing?

As I mentioned above, PlayStation Experience is meant to excite gamers and those around them about PlayStation. In order to do that, it needs to be seen by as wide of an audience as possible in the most easily accessible way yet I could find PlayStation Experience on just about every device except Sony’s own flagship console. Just prior to the show, I launched my PS4 thinking that there would be an easy way to find the live stream. I looked in the usual places, like PlayStation Events which seems like a logical enough place to find the stream. Well, you’d be wrong. Sure, the event page had information about the stream but the best it could do was point me at the web or launch the PlayStation web browser.

How could there not be a direct link to the Twitch or YouTube app on there? Then I thought that perhaps Sony was promoting PSX on the ‘What’s New’ section – and still I was wrong. Surely I could navigate to ‘Live from PlayStation’ and find the live stream from PSX. Well, I was wrong again, despite the name. Not content on just watching it on my iPad screen which ironically allowed me to find the live stream in seconds by just launching the Twitch app and seeing it as a promoted broadcast, I finally used AirPlay to stream the event to my Apple TV. Yes, in order for me to watch a PlayStation event, I had to use my Apple products. Let that sink in for a minute and let’s look at a stark contrast to all of this.

When Apple hosts their WWDC or Fall events, watching the show is as easy as picking up your favorite iOS device. On the iPhone or iPad? No problem – simply navigate to Apple.com and on the front page, there will be a link to the live stream. Of course the link isn’t limited for iOS devices and in fact can be consumed on any Mac, Windows, or Android device. Furthermore, if you have an Apple TV, during the weeks surrounding the event, a special Apple Events app appears which has a catalogue of past reveals and of course a place to watch the upcoming event live.

Finally, having had more time to dig around on PS4, I found a way to consume the live stream which is just a few short clicks away! Launch the

• PlayStation Store
• Navigate to
  • PS Experience
  • Watch Live
• Download Live Events Viewer app
• Launch app
• Click PlayStation Experience
• Click ‘Buy Now’ for some odd reason though it’s free (but why does it even have a price tag associated with it?)
• Launch into PlayStation Store
• Download PlayStation Experience – Day 1
• Hit the PS button on Dualshock 4, seeing how it doesn’t take you to anywhere after that
• Navigate to TV & Video
• Launch Live Events Viewer
• Click on PlayStation Experience – Day 1 and enjoy

Easy and obvious right? It’s as if Sony didn’t want us to watch the event. It’s frankly appalling that it took nearly 15 steps in order for me to watch a PlayStation event on Sony’s own leading console and 2-3 steps on my iOS device.

No backup? Are you kidding me?

If demos are tough, live demos are simply a bitch. Between beta hardware, software and a whole hell of other challenges in between, demoing live is downright terrifying for even the most veteran presenters. There are lots of points of failure and the best you can do is rehearse over and over again and ensure that you have a tech crew with a backup plan just in case. To use Apple as an example, during each keynote, especially during WWDC where new OS’s debut with apps that are still deep in development, multiple iMacs are always on stage. Their job isn’t to dress up the stage but instead are set up so that in case one unit crashes, a backup iss ready to flipped on at a moment’s notice with minimal downtime.

For Sony and PlayStation VR, arguably their most ambitious leap in gaming, you’d think there would be a backup. Nope. When Dr. Richard Marks, head of PlayStation VR took to stage with a colleague, they were keen on showing us a new TRON like demo they’d put together in the past few weeks. Far from a finished product, the demo instead was meant to be treated as a proof of concept with two PlayStation VR units networked together to allow the two to interact and play against one and other.

While one unit launched without a hitch, it became clear pretty early on that Mark’s system was being problematic. In this case, the problem didn’t seem to be from PS VR and instead the game; his hands didn’t simply load. In fact, for all I know, it could have been because of the PlayStation Move controllers, but that’s not important. Instead, the two decided to muck through the demo which fell flat on its face since the entire point was to show their interaction. The mucking would go on for the next few minutes before the two assured audiences that PS VR is cool and that they should give it a try on the show floor.

Why there wasn’t a backup PS4, PS VR, and Move controller somewhere off stage, ready to be plugged in at a moment’s notice is beyond me. Audiences understand live demos can go wrong. It’s happened plenty of times to even high profile developers like Bungie when they first debuted Destiny at E3 and Naughty Dog most recently at E3 2015. In the most recent case, somebody simply had another PS4 with Uncharted 4 ready and the feed was switched to the backup PS4 within 15 seconds and the gameplay not only went on, but ended up blowing the roof off the house.

If VR is to be the next frontier in entertainment and perhaps beyond, Sony needs to treat the platform with more maturity and thought.

Wait, is the show over?

Of course a show which had problems with its flow, presenter choices, and technical challenges would end in a similar fashion. While most keynotes, be it from Apple or Sony at E3 want to end on a high note, they tend to bring one last speaker at the end to wrap things up. During hopefully what’s a brief speech, the presenter will give a recap of the day’s event to highlight once again the key takeaways from the show since we tend to get bombarded with a ton of information. If not that, the presenter will at least simply thank the audience for attending before bringing the show to a close.

Sony instead chose the most awkward way to end the show. After Paragon, a new MOBA title from Epic was announced and shown for the first time on stage via a trailer, the lights simply went up and the show concluded. You could see the confusion from the crowd and those watching the live stream. What at first seemed like a pause and a setup for something else was simply the end of the show. I’m not saying we needed an Oprah moment where everybody in the audience received a free PS4, but a simple acknowledgement of the crowd and the many thousands watching the live stream seems like an extremely obvious way to end the show. I’m not sure if Sony was thinking that Paragon was a mic drop type of game, but even if it was, you should still really end the show with a little more clarity.

Part of me can’t imagine that nobody thought of that and would like to think that something had to be cut at the very bleeding last second or that a page of the script was lost. Still, all it would have taken for the show to end properly was to have somebody from PlayStation, perhaps Shawn Layden (President & CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment America), who kicked off the show, to take stage for just a minute, even as a complete improv to end things much more meaningfully.

Where are my games?

It’s very fitting that we start this journey with problems on PlayStation 4/PlayStation Network and that we’ll end it there. PlayStation Experience has one simple goal – to build excitement and sense of urgency around PS4 and one such way to do this is to have a few games be available directly after the keynote on PSN. They include Fat Princess Adventures and Guns Up! to name a few yet even 2 hours after the finale, neither title was anywhere to be found on PSN. Once live, things are as you’d expect, all over the place. While Fat Princess Adventures appears in the PS Experience section of the PlayStation Store, nowhere is there any indication about a promised discount for PS+ members and additional DLC option to go along with it.

YEP: Fat Princess Adventures releases today – buy before Dec. 15 for bonus DLC & PS+ members get a discount! pic.twitter.com/mMmW1RlfJw

— Santa Monica Studio (@SonySantaMonica) December 5, 2015 

Now I’m not sure if this is a glitch on their end or if the price currently reflects the discount – though, that doesn’t appear to be the case as when a game receives a PS+ discount, you’ll see a mark indicating the normal price and the special PS+ price. As for Guns Up! the free strategy game for PS4? Well, it’s there, but just not under the PS Experience section. Instead you’ll have to navigate to the free game section of the store which though it make sense, would make far more sense if the game was in both places. Once again, the whole point of the PlayStation Experience is to build excitement and interest around PS4 and its games. So why on earth a game that was just revealed, announced, and released during the event would not be under the event’s own section is beyond me.

Again as a stark contrast, when Apple announces a product’s availability during a keynote, be it a new MacBook or a new app, they’re able to have it available online, in retail stores, and via their apps for purchase. Don’t mind that their stores can go down at times during those peak hours because of the sheer volume of people looking to purchase their products that dwarfs that of PlayStation. Instead, it’s their ability to be able to execute the vision that when Tim Cook stands on stage and says something is now available, somebody within Apple was, in layman’s terms, able to flip a switch and push it out to millions and millions of devices that could be demanding access to it at any minute.

For Sony, they don’t have that scale problem yet something as simple as ensuring a handful of games are up on their store isn’t something they’re able to do without complication.

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None of these challenges alone is a deal breaker and even put together won’t derail PlayStation. But for a multi-billion dollar, platform-leading console and its parent company, the fact that these blunders are beginning to be a regular thing is embarrassing. If the future of PlayStation is beyond consoles and into apps like PlayStation Now which one day will be available on more and more devices, Sony has to be able to execute from a presentational level to get consumers and industry members excited and be able to deliver on the technical end with a store front and backend system that’s able to handle an event that was hopefully months in the making. More then ever, gamers have choices when it comes to how they entertain themselves.

While there was a time where Sony’s only competitor was perhaps Nintendo and Microsoft, Sony is now competing with the likes of Apple, mobile gaming in general, and any other form of media that can steal your attention for a few hours like Netflix. As you grow older, the free time you have on any given day lessens more and more and yet everyday, there is something new lobbying for our attention and it’s those few hours of precious free time that Sony’s fighting for. The consumer of today doesn’t have the attention span or the reliance on a single point of entertainment and can easily move on to other things.

While the new Apple TV might not be a direct competitor to PlayStation today, can the same be said about it tomorrow? The handheld market and gaming market as a whole once scoffed at mobile games and now look at the landscape: many mobile games from small indie studios are transforming into multi-million dollar companies that can competently fight for our time and money. And in their corner, they have the likes of Apple which allows them to easily design, release, and update games on millions of devices like iPhone, iPad, and now Apple TV.

Discuss:

Am I turning into ‘old man yells at cloud’ or do you see validity in what I’m saying?