Who would have thought one VR’s most popular games was coming to Sony’s next-gen VR headset? Probably everyone, but now the company has confirmed it is indeed bringing Beat Saber to PSVR 2.

Announced during Sony’s CES 2023 keynote, Beat Saber is said to be “in development” for PSVR 2, a game created by the Meta-owned studio Beat Games.

There’s a few more questions still in need of answering between now and PSVR 2’s February 22nd launch though—one in particular: is Meta going to offer PSVR 2 support as a free upgrade to owners of the game on PSVR? Sony is mum on the subject for now, with more information promised sometime in “the near future.”

There’s a growing list of games getting free PSVR 2 upgrades, and we’d love to see the block-slashing rhythm game among them. After all, backwards compatibility isn’t a thing with PSVR 2…

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Launched in 2018 on Rift, SteamVR, and PSVR, Beat Saber almost immediately became the medium’s most recognizable title, and it’s still chugging years later. It regularly tops PSVR’s most downloaded charts, and was even in the most recent list of top-selling VR games on Steam—a testament to its continued strength across all VR platforms.

It would make a good deal of sense that it will indeed come as a free upgrade, as Beat Saber’s revenue model is very much tied to its continuous paid DLC releases, which regularly offer up music packs from some of the world’s leading pop artists. Asking a PSVR owner to buy a base game and hundreds of dollars of DLC they already own would be a pretty dicey maneuver to say the least.

In any case, it appears Meta is sticking with its promise to make sure Beat Saber persists as VR’s premier cross-platform title, though there’s no telling whether they charged Sony a pretty penny to make it happen.

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Scott Hayden
Well before the first modern XR products hit the market, Scott recognized the potential of the technology and set out to understand and document its growth. He has been professionally reporting on the space for nearly a decade as Editor at Road to VR, authoring more than 4,000 articles on the topic. Scott brings that seasoned insight to his reporting from major industry events across the globe.
  • Tommy

    More importantly, Gran Turismo 7 is a free VR upgrade for launch!!

  • Daniel Meyer

    The VR market still needs all the help it can get to keep on growing. Bringing games for all platforms can only be helpful in my opinion. Wished Sony would be that open minded too… but well… I will shoot myself in the knee before that happens ^^’

    • Sven Viking

      Not quite the same thing but Meta said Iron Man VR’s Quest release was “in collaboration with Sony”.

  • Rob

    Playing Beat Saber on wired VR. I wont like to experience that with wires. I hope that Meta pushed Sony to bring some of its own games to Quest in return. But not sure if thats the case. Altough Iron Man wad once a psvr exclusive and is now on quest.

    • Sven Viking

      They also bought the studio that made Iron Man VR, but in the announcement of the Quest version they said “in partnership with Sony” so Sony must still have had some sort of rights over it and made a deal.

  • Sven Viking

    1. Due to the price, PS5 requirement and tethered setup they probably still don’t see PSVR2 as competing with them all that directly

    2. To some extent they may still believe that a rising tide lifts all boats and general popularity for VR will be beneficial to their Metaverse plans overall

    3. The money they’ll make (possibly including additional sweeteners from Sony?) probably doesn’t hurt

    But in my opinion the most important thing is probably just that keeping Beat Saber popular is in Meta’s best interests. If a random person sees it on YouTube or tries it as a friend’s house or whatever and decides to get it for themselves, regardless of whether it was the PC or PSVR version, they’re more likely to get a Quest than anything else because for most people Quest will always be the cheapest Beat Saber machine available. (That’s also why you’ll probably never see Beat Saber on something like Pico Neo that actually is a direct Quest competitor.)

    Additionally keeping it off PSVR2 might encourage Sony to develop and promote a game that directly competes with Beat Saber, which could take away from Beat Saber’s popularity. In the worst case it could even end up like Guitar Hero and Rock Band.

    • Christian Schildwaechter

      Beat Saber is also special, as there are a lot of people who only play Beat Saber and/or bought into VR specifically for Beat Saber. The stylized graphics mean that running it on a PC or PS5 doesn’t provide a vastly improved experiences, and the simple gameplay and continued popularity on all platforms pretty much guarantee that it will be used to introduce a lot of friends and family members to VR. All this makes Beat Saber on PSVR/PCVR a great way to get new VR users onto the significantly cheaper Quest, much better than any other Meta sponsored game ever could.

  • Sven Viking

    Who would have thought one VR’s most popular games was coming to Sony’s next-gen VR headset?

    While imho it would have been a bad move on their part, it was by no means inconceivable that Meta could have decided to keep it from a competitor as they do with more direct competitors like Pico etc.

  • Anonymous

    Meta’s move here is not surprising at all. Meta doesn’t make money on the Quest 2 so they rely on software sales to at least offset this. Not only Beat Saber, it will be smart for Meta to allow more games on other headsets too, especially those that already existed before Meta’s acquisition.

    • Sven Viking

      Getting more people into their ecosystem is still a big advantage, just because if someone buys PSVR2 to play Beat Saber, Meta makes money (though less than they would on their own store), but if that person then goes on to buy another ten games Meta gets ~nothing rather than the 30% they would have got on Quest. For reasons I mentioned in another comment I still think they’ll benefit more from this overall than they would have from keeping it exclusive though.

    • Ad

      The software doesn’t make anywhere near enough money. The point is to lose enough money that no one else can compete and force an XR future before anyone else so they can own it wholesale.

  • ViRGiN

    Maybe Sony paid them a lot. You don’t want to be known as the headset that can’t play beat saber.

  • Ookami

    Meta may have bought it, but it never became an exclusive. You can still buy it on Steam and everything

    • Sven Viking

      It would have been awkward to actually remove it from Steam and PSVR after purchasing them, when Sony or Microsoft buy a studio for example they don’t usually remove all their old games from competing platforms.

      This is the first new platform they’ve come to after Meta purchased them, though — if they were independent you could bet they would have been on Pico Neo by now (and probably even Vive Focus for the Chinese market). While they’re smaller markets it’s still a lot of money for the relatively small effort of porting a Unity game already running under Android on the exact same chip, and Pico would likely be willing to pay out a lot on top of that to secure them since not having Beat Saber is a big competitive disadvantage for a consumer headset.

  • Max-Dmg

    Maybe FB should spend their money on hiring a QA team for their oculus software?

  • Danny Decks

    Iron Man for Beat Saber trade. Wonder what’s next.

    • They bought the Iron Man studio, that had nothing to do with Sony. Astrobot for Quest would be a nice concession.

      • neodraig

        If they have to port Astro Bot, doing it on the on the PSVR 2 would be way better move ;)

  • philingreat

    To show the FTC that even if they buy studios, that doesn’t mean that games can’t release on other platforms

    • Ad

      Which is a lie, as soon as the government turns their attention away, they’ll go back to being a monopoly.

  • alxslr

    Maybe because as many others they don’t consider that PSVR2 is real Quest competition, but a different kind of product.

    (I think they are wrong, they are 2 kinds of VR product competing all the time since Quest1 launched; both categories have their fan base, as we can see in this forum, and many potencial-target users are shared).

  • alxslr

    Maybe because as many others they don’t consider that PSVR2 is real Quest competition, but a different kind of product for a different audience.

    I think they are wrong, they are 2 kinds of VR products competing all the time since Quest1 launched; both categories have their fan base (as we can see in this forum), and many potencial-target users are shared.

    So allowing Beat Saber in PSVR2 is a double-edged sword for Meta

    • Sven Viking

      I think it’s in-between — they compete directly for a certain percentage of consumers but there are a lot of mainstream consumers Meta is targeting who don’t own a PS5 and would be very unlikely to ever one to use VR.

      I agree that it’s a double-edged sword but for reasons I posted earlier in the thread I think Meta will still profit more than they lose from this.

  • Ad

    It’s not on Pico. Honestly I think they did this because of the anti trust lawsuits, and they decided PSVR2 was less of a threat than other standalones.

  • MOT

    If you own a ps5. Would you buy a quest 2 or a psvr2? Highly unlikely you would go for the quest 2. Meta know that Sony have a very large and loyal customer base for playstation. Numbers Meta could only dream of at this stage.

  • DaRc

    I fell away from VR gaming years ago due to lack of quality content. When I quit, Beat Saber was the big thing. Five years later, and Beat Saber is still the big thing. So sad seeing the state of VR today. It had so much potential, but after the purchase of Oculus, VR devs only developed shovelware for Facebook VR, which as predicted, destroyed VR.

    Here’s hoping Sony can bring the magic back, but lets bury Beat Saber once and for all.