PlayStation TV

~ the eulogy ~

the first time i heard of playstation tv was a tech site review in early 2015, about a year after the western launch, in a "is this still a thing" piece. by then i was thirty and not buying handheld-adjacent hardware on impulse anymore. the device existed in turkish electronics catalogues sort of, through gray-market resellers shipping the western sku for around 250 lira plus a memory card, which was the part that made everyone close the tab.

sony announced the vita tv at the japanese pre-tgs press conference in september '13. it launched at ¥9,480 the following november, around $95, which was cheap for a console-shaped object. it was a small black box that ran the vita's operating system through an hdmi cable, with a vita cartridge slot on top and a dualshock 3 in the box for controller. it shipped without a rear touchpad or motion sensor, because the box itself had none of those inputs.

the catalog was the problem from day one. a vita game that asked you to pinch the back panel or rotate the device to aim could not run on a hdmi puck. sony shipped a whitelist of compatible titles at launch and the list was shorter than people expected. a lot of the games people actually owned on their vita refused to load. the modders found that many of those games would actually work fine if you forced the system past the whitelist, which made the compatibility story feel more like a product decision than a hardware limit.

~ the dossier ~

~ the origin ~

the japanese launch did decent numbers for the first week, around 42,000 units, mostly to vita owners who wanted a way to put their existing library on a television. by month two the weekly numbers had dropped into the low thousands. the device was repositioned as a remote-play endpoint for the ps4 that had launched at the same time, which was a real use case but not one most ps4 owners were going to buy a separate box for.

the western release got pushed to october 2014 in north america at $99, then november in europe and australia. the western branding swapped vita tv for playstation tv on the box. the reviews were mixed in a polite way. ign and eurogamer both said the same thing, the hardware was fine for the money, the software story was not. by mid-2015 the playstation tv shelf at most electronics stores in the us had stopped getting restocked.

~ how it actually ended ~

the wind-down was a sequence of quiet announcements rather than one event. in fall '15 sony confirmed the playstation tv had stopped manufacturing for europe and north america. on february 28 2016 the japanese site updated to say shipments had ended. the press release was a paragraph. nothing got launched in its place. the vita itself was already in late life and the ps4 was eating the rest of sony's portable energy by then.

on the second-hand market the box stayed cheap and reasonably available through the late 2010s. the homebrew community kept it relevant past the official shutdown. the henkaku exploit landed on vita firmware 3.60 in mid-2016, the same trick worked on a playstation tv, which suddenly turned it into the cheapest possible psp emulator running on official-ish hardware. that niche kept the unit in circulation longer than the catalog ever did.

~ what came after ~

the playstation tv sits in a small graveyard of "console-shaped puck that runs the library of another device" experiments. nexus q tried it for google services with no purchase model. ouya tried it for android games with a price floor at $99. each of those died for a different reason. the playstation tv died for the most product-management reason of the set, the company that built it stopped feeding it because the parent device was already on its way out.

in retrospect the smarter version of this product was the apple tv app store launched the following year, which approached the same idea from the other direction, a tv box that became a games platform later. sony's bet was to take a handheld and put it on a tv. that bet did not pay off. the better version of the idea waited another six years for the steam deck dock and the nintendo switch's own dock, which solved the controller and screen problem by including both in the same box.

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