First Click: Sony missed an open goal with the PlayStation TV

The problem was, Sony did the absolute minimum possible to make the Vita TV concept work. As I noted in my review in late 2013, the handheld Vita’s touchscreen interface was nonsensically ported straight to the TV and PS3 controller, leaving users holding buttons to "peel" apps off the screen. Output was limited to 720p, making it a much less appealing Netflix box than most competitors — if you could even get the Netflix app in your region at all, which European users inexplicably could not. And the product relied on Sony’s pricey proprietary memory cards for storage.

But the Vita TV’s most egregious failure was that it failed at being a Vita. Many games’ reliance on dubious Vita features like the rear touchpad came back to haunt Sony, as vast swathes of the system’s library was rendered incompatible with a regular gaming controller. And even some games that should by rights have worked just didn’t, for whatever reason. In the end, the Vita TV worked best as a tiny box for downloaded PSone and PSP games, or as a fallback streaming terminal to play Destiny on when your PS4’s TV was taken up. Which, okay, was worth $99 to me, but clearly not to many other people.

None of these issues should have been insurmountable for Sony. You look at Valve, which released a Steam Controller that, while quirky, nevertheless does a good job of making mouse-heavy PC games work well in the living room. You look at Nvidia, which has stood on the shoulders of Android to adapt the fractured OS into the more credible Shield gaming platform. You even look at Apple, which finally released a gaming-capable Apple TV that, for all its problems, is a better product that at least has more room to grow than Sony’s ever did.

The PlayStation TV should have been a slam dunk for Sony. But the company that has consistently failed to deliver a coherent software ecosystem now punts its biggest plays to Google and ignores its own platforms like the Vita. A well-designed, inexpensive set-top box with the PlayStation ecosystem behind it would have beaten Apple to market by years and potentially appealed to anyone who likes to watch videos or play games. Instead, the PlayStation TV just appealed to Destiny fans with two televisions.