Virtual reality is something that took the videogame industry by storm around a decade ago and since then the strives for both VR and AR gaming have been mediocre to say the least. The problem with VR has always been accessibility to consumers, the reality is that a lot of the top VR headsets on the market are either incompatible with current set ups that most people have, or they are far too expensive to warrant a purchase. Sony has been facing that same problem recently with its release of the PSVR 2. Its being reported by Bloomberg that Sony has actually paused the production of further PSVR2’s to create inventory space in the company due to poor sales. There’s a lot of reasons for this pause of production and the apparent failure of the PSVR2, many of those problems already being listed such as pricing. The current sale price for the PSVR2 is $550 US dollars, and quickly comparing that to the base price of a PlayStation 5 ($500) you can very quickly see why players may be turned off to the idea of purchasing the new VR.
It doesn’t really make sense for an addition to a product to cost more than the project itself. Add on top of that another major reason for lack of sales, it has a rather small library of games available at the moment, with a lot of the titles included being smaller extensions to main games such as Horizon: Call Of The Mountain, and the Resident Evil 4 VR edition. There are more titles slated to come out throughout the coming year, but there is not much excitement regarding those titles, let alone much marketing being done for them. Sony has made some leaps to fix these issues as they have since announced PC compatibility with the PSVR2, therefore expanding its catalog even further.
There does seem to be a clear solution for Sony, and that’s simply lowering the cost of the VR headset. But seeing the strings of layoffs hitting not just Sony but every major studio and developer, it does not look like they will be wanting to decrease prices any time soon.