How to turn consoles on and off in a gaming cafe, without smart plugs

Closing time in a console room has a shape to it. The last two customers on station 6 finally stand up, you cash them out, then you start the lap: down the row, controller in hand, hold the home button, choose power, wait for the light to fade. Eight stations, four minutes if nothing goes wrong. Then you notice station 3 is awake because somebody drifted past it an hour ago and nudged a controller. Station 8 has been sitting on the home screen since the afternoon, warm and drawing power for nothing. Morning is the same lap in reverse, except now people are already at the door.

Nobody opens a games room to do this. It is the kind of job that costs three or four minutes twice a day plus one forgotten console a week, which is small enough that you never fix it and big enough to annoy you every single night. If you are still costing out a venue, the guide to opening a PlayStation cafe covers the decisions that sit above this one.

Worth separating two different things at the start. Driving a console by hand from your counter is one job. Sony gives you a free tool for it: PS Remote Play puts a console in a window on your PC so you can install an update or sign an account out without crouching at a TV. That is manual work you still have to remember to do. Console power management is the other job: the room turning itself on and off around your sessions while you serve drinks.

Why the socket behind the TV only does half the job

The usual answer to this problem is a smart plug. Put a controllable socket behind every station, kill the socket at the end of the session, done.

Except it is not done, because of one piece of physics that no amount of software fixes. Restoring mains power to a PS5 does not boot it. The console comes back to a dark, unpowered state and waits for somebody to press its button. So a plug gives you exactly half the routine. Closing is covered. Opening is not, which means you have bought a socket for every station and kept the morning lap anyway.

The other half of the problem is what a hard cut does. A socket switching off is the same event as a power failure. Whatever the customer had not saved is gone, the console gets a dirty shutdown and the database rebuild message on next boot is a real thing your staff will eventually see. It is also a physical object sitting on the floor near a paying customer. Anything a customer can reach, a customer will reach.

Smart plug versus network power control

Here is how the approaches actually compare. I went through what each product says about itself, because every one of those pages uses the word "control" and means something different by it.

The interesting row is the fourth one. Waking and resting a PlayStation over the network has existed for years as command line tools written by hobbyists. It has not existed inside a product that also knows a customer sat down at 19:40, owes you for ninety minutes and has an open snack tab.

How do I turn off the PlayStation in my internet cafe?

Putting a console to rest is a message over the local network, not a switch flipping anywhere in the room. The only decision left is when to send it. HandyCafe gives you two moments to choose from: the session ending and the bill being settled. Both wait out a grace period in minutes before the command actually goes.

They are separate on purpose. The second one exists because of how counters really work. A customer stops playing at 21:30, wanders over, chats, pays at 21:38. If standby only fired on session end, the console would already be resting while you were still talking about the bill. So "put to standby when the bill is settled" is its own switch, which covers a session that was stopped earlier and billed afterwards. The same logic runs through how hourly usage gets tracked in a game hall: the play clock and the payment moment are not the same moment.

The grace period handles the other awkward case. Somebody pays, then says "actually, one more hour". Without a delay you would be waking a console you put to sleep ninety seconds ago. Set the grace to a few minutes and the room stops flapping.

Waking works the same way from the other end. A session starts at the counter and the console comes out of rest. By the time the customer has walked to the station it is on the home screen waiting.

Setting it up, one pairing per console

The part people expect to hate is signing into PlayStation Network. That happens once for the whole cafe, not once per station. Console two onwards skips it entirely.

1. On the console, open Settings > System > Remote Play > Link Device. An 8-digit code appears on the TV.
2. In HandyCafe, open Settings > Consoles and press Scan Now.
3. Press Pair next to the console that appeared, then choose which of your console records it is.
4. Sign in to PlayStation Network. First console only. The window closes itself when it is done.
5. Type the 8-digit code and press Connect.

After that the console card carries a power badge. Clicking it opens a power panel showing the current state, the paired devices attached to that console and recent activity.

Before any of it works, the console has to be reachable while it rests. That is Settings > System > Power Saving > Features Available in Rest Mode, with both "Stay Connected to the Internet" and "Enable Turning On PS5 from Network" enabled. This is the usual reason a console is found by the scan yet refuses to wake.

How do I manage PlayStations in an esports venue?

A twelve-station floor changes the maths. Manual power is not a four minute lap any more. It is a job somebody is paid to do twice a day, done by the one person who should be behind the counter selling energy drinks instead. When power runs off the session, the lap disappears.

Every power command is recorded. Each console's power panel shows recent activity, including the reason a command failed. "Did not turn off" stops being a mystery when the log says the console was never paired or that the grace period had not elapsed yet.

Then there is the switch called prevent unauthorised use. It is off by default. Turn it on and any console that wakes without a booking gets put back to rest, the event is recorded and the cashier is told. That is your friend-of-a-friend on FIFA in the corner of a busy Saturday. He loses the screen without you crossing the room.

A floor that size needs more than power control. Choosing software for an esports venue covers the rest of the list.

The TVs switch with the consoles

You pair the screen to a console record once, not to each session. From then on it does whatever that console does. On LG webOS the pairing also carries HDMI input selection. Opening a session does not just switch the TV on. It drops the screen straight onto the console input. No customer standing in front of a "no signal" message wondering which button on which remote.

Pairing a display: switch the TV on, open the console's power panel or the Device Finder page in Settings, press Connect as display, choose the console it sits next to and accept the prompt on the TV screen. Android TV shows a six-digit code you type back. HandyCafe works out the protocol from the TV itself. Nobody at your counter needs to know webOS from Tizen.

One honest gotcha here. A TV that is switched off during a scan has every control port closed, which looks identical to an unsupported set. Switch it on before you go looking for it.

What else the scan picks up

Settings > Device Finder lists everything answering on the local network: consoles, TVs, the PCs HandyCafe already manages, switches and routers, customers' phones. Each row shows what the device claims to be, its hardware address, its network address and whether it still needs setting up. Devices that answered without saying anything useful about themselves get grouped as unidentified, which is usually a phone or a printer.

On privacy, the scan is a live look and nothing about those devices is stored. There is no record sitting on your server of which customer phones were in the building on which night. Pairing secrets are encrypted before they are written to disk and they never leave the server.

What this does not do

Xbox turns up in Device Finder with a name and an address and that is where it stops. There is no power command to send it. A room that is half Xbox keeps half its opening lap. You should know that before you buy anything.

PS3 has no network power protocol at all. Nothing to talk to.

One network rule sits underneath all of it. The server and the consoles have to be on the same network. Guest Wi-Fi counts as a different one. A scan that comes back completely empty is nearly always that.

Two weeks in

Opening: you turn the key. First session of the day starts on station 4, that console wakes, its TV switches on and lands on the right input while the customer is still hanging up their coat. Nothing else in the room is powered, because nothing else has anyone in it yet.

Closing: the last customer stops, you settle the bill at the counter, the grace period runs and the console and its TV go to rest by themselves. No lap. If something did not sleep, the power panel tells you why instead of leaving you to guess. The electricity bill stops paying for eight consoles idling through the night.