PSVR 2 Gets Its Biggest Sale Yet Ahead of PC VR Adapter Release

TL;DR: I expect the prices to fall, but no extra VR software development from Sony, as the PSVR2 strategy is to make AAA VR feasible by attaching VR to regular PS5 games, not again creating large VR titles that so far have financially failed on every VR platform. Sony's not creating dedicated 1st party VR titles wasn't part of the sabotage, but what they were always aiming for, so even a very supportive management will stick to that.

What happened and what will happen is hard to tell, as all we get are a couple of rumors to figure out what will be rather complex internal processes. I think that the PSVR2 hardware plus hybrid game concept is actually extremely well designed, so there have to be people inside of Sony that really want it to succeed. We know that Ryan inherited PSVR1 from his predecessor, never got warm with VR and after the launch of PS5 made some blabla comments about how they were looking at what they learned from PSVR1 for the future. Which sounded mostly like a PSVR2 being years away, if it would ever be released.

Interestingly the Sony Japan division that apparently intervened was their movie entertainment business. They didn't really care about PSVR2 as a gaming HMD, but wanted to have a HMD in case watching movies with them would ever catch on. So Sony now pushing PSVR2 again might even be connected to Apple making movies and video one of the main applications for AVP, getting general praise for this. We just don't know, but with the movie division being the driving force, OLED displays should be safe. Sony's phone division is one of the main users of 4K OLED panels, designed by Sony and manufactured by Samsung/LG, meaning OLED will even be less costly for them than for others.

I suspect that the stupid pricing and lack of promotion during the last holiday season is at least partly Ryan's fault, while the lack of first party VR games is actually part of the PSVR2 concept and will therefore not change. The whole hardware design of PSVR2 aims at enabling current gen PS5 AAA titles to also run on in VR on the fixed hardware console, by compensating the usually much higher requirements in VR with resolution restrictions, ETFR, reprojection, checkerboard upscaling and more.

This was very likely a reaction to VR turning out to only attract a small part of the total user base, not enough to pay for designed for VR AAA titles. So the only way to get AAA VR titles was to get some flat AAA titles targeting the whole PS5 player base to also integrate VR support, with RE8 and GT7 as very convincing demonstrations for what Sony is going for. But this also means that basically all the future effort will go into making VR integration easier and cheaper for 3rd party developers instead of releasing any dedicated VR only titles. HCotM is basically an expensive tech demo, with no intention to ever scale it to something like the other Horizon games.

I'd expect the now split software/hardware management to pretty much stay on course with the hybrid strategy, mostly supporting other companies to add VR to flat games and doing the same for some of their own franchises. But even then only for those titles that kind of already fit VR, so I don't expect VR support for God of War.

Conceptually this makes PSVR2 an accessory that allows to experience some PS5 games in a more immersive way, not a separate platform like Quest that comes with games designed specifically for it. That may be disappointing for VR enthusiasts hoping that Sony would throw its weight/money behind pushing the medium, esp. with 1st party AAA development. But with the current low VR user numbers this is actually the best/most realistic way to get a larger number of AAA titles playable in VR, without depending on someone like Meta always paying the bill or Valve releasing a "this is how you do VR right" title like HL:A once a decade.

I really have no idea how this will end, how much trust was already lost or how many hybrid games are still in development or were already cancelled. Game developers also wondered about SIE management's (missing) support for PSVR2, so just the lack of commitment for years alone might have ruined the clever hybrid strategy. The great part about hybrid is that it removes a lot of pressure for PSVR2 to sell in huge numbers. PS Vita as a separate platform needed to have its own, large enough user base. But PSVR2 as an accessory for regular AAA can get away with only a fraction of the PS5 users, as those AAA will be released anyway. If developers can add VR to their projects for 5-10% additional cost, than PSVR2 only has to increase sales by those 5-10% to keep the AAA games with VR support coming.

And that will attract a lot of existing VR users that have been hoping for VR AAA for years, as well as a lot of PS5 owners, at least if Sony now moves the price to sane levels. Apparently they sold as may PSVR2 on the first day of the USD 350 sale as during the whole of 2024 before at USD 550. So there definitely is interest in PSVR2, all it required to sell a lot was to get rid of the idiots that priced it as a luxury item.