Sony focuses on the joy of gaming at PlayStation Experience

After attending my first PlayStation Experience event in San Francisco, I liked how the whole experience was focused on the joy of gaming. From the very start, Sony made it clear that the event was a combination of talking about new games and appreciation event for the fans who have purchased 30 million PlayStation 4 video game consoles since 2013.

Our GamesBeat team attended the two-hour keynote talk on Saturday, and we also spent both days checking out the games in the exhibit halls and interviewing developers on site. The live Sony event where Sony showed off the newest games for the PS4, PlayStation VR, and PlayStation Vita systems in San Francisco could put some pressure on Microsoft and Nintendo to respond with their own live events. Of course, Microsoft had a big presence at the Gamescom fan event in Europe, and Nintendo often updates its fans through one-way online video presentations. Business people call Sony’s tactics “experiential marketing.” I think it just plain smart and an improvement on other trade shows, where a lot of stuff just isn’t playable.

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Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.