One of the most cringe inducing parts of Sony’s PlayStation Experience keynote was their entire VR portion. It was poorly thought out, and mostly showed us games that looked unappealing, but perhaps worst of all, and most unfortunately, the stage demo that Sony chose to lead their PSVR section of the keynote with malfunctioned- if someone was relying on this showing to make their first impression about VR, it can’t have been a good look.
However, former Epic Games developer, and Boss Key Productions founder Cliff Bleszinski defended the demo, encouraging people to cut Sony some slack and stating that he finds the PlayStation VR ‘solid.’
“Cut Sony some slack, stage demos are dumb and break all the time, Sony’s VR is solid, people,” he said. “If I had a nickel for every stage demo that fucked up for me I could retire. Again.”
Look, I get it- the stage demo malfunctioned, and I didn’t actually have any issue with that, especially since the entire thing was just done in two weeks. Having something like that happen before an audience as big as the PSX’s audience can be terrifying, and the presenters did the best they could. With that said, my issues with the VR segment were:
- Why did Sony choose to showcase VR, an inherently unshowcasable technology, with a live stage demo?
- Why did they choose to do it with a tech demo that had only been in development for two weeks?
- Why not choose professional presenters to do it?
- Plus, of course, the entire VR segment, even removing the live demo, was awful, with most of the games shown off very unappealing
I feel for the people who had to put up with the malfunctioning equipment on stage, and I feel bad for them. I do not, however, excuse Sony for a very poorly structured and paced conference.