In 2021, Sony announced it was working on a next-generation headset it described as “a next-gen VR system that enhances everything from resolution and field of view to tracking and input.” Roughly a year later, PlayStation VR2 was officially revealed, with a release date set for February 2023.
Fast-forward to just over a year after its release, and the PSVR2 has not achieved its full potential. Between its lack of first-party exclusives, steep price, lack of backward compatibility, and retail delays, the PSVR2 has barely made a ripple in the VR market.
Now, amid devastating layoffs that include the closure of the VR-focused PlayStation London, it seems like PSVR2 may already be on its last legs. Here’s how we got there and what the future may hold for PlayStation’s troubled VR headset.
Great Hardware, Not a Ton of System-Selling Games
There is no denying the PSVR2’s hardware is fantastic: OLED displays, great controllers with haptic support, and eye tracking, just to name a few. Yet, as I pointed out before its release last year, one of the major measures of success for the PSVR2 is a strong showing of exclusive content, and that part has generally failed to materialize in the year since release.
Take the PSVR2’s launch lineup, which featured over 40 games. It’s an impressive number, but upon closer inspection, only three of those games were true PSVR2 exclusives, and only one of those games – Horizon Call of the Mountain – went beyond an optional VR mode.
By comparison, Meta has dominated the VR market for the last five years not just because it does not need to be tethered to another device to function but because it has desirable exclusives like Resident Evil 4 VR and Asgard’s Wrath 2.
Elsewhere, third-party support for PSVR2 has mostly been okay. Games like Supermassive’s The Dark Pictures: Switchback VR and the now-defunct First Contact’s Firewall Ultra were met with lukewarm receptions. Synapse and C-Smash VRS were better-received and have turned into two of its most popular games, though the latter will become a multi-platform release this April.
Despite touting the PSVR2 as a AAA VR platform, Sony doesn’t seem interested in having its first-party studios work on VR games. Aside from multiple unannounced games canceled by the company, some of the studios affected by the recent reduction in staff include the aforementioned London Studio, which worked on two PSVR games, including 2019’s Blood & Truth Firesprite, which developed PSVR games Air Force Special Ops: Nightfall, The Persistence, and more recently Horizon Call of the Moutain, also lost staff.
Those familiar with Sony’s gaming hardware ecosystem are likely realizing the similarities between PlayStation VR2 and PlayStation Vita, Sony’s gaming handheld first released in 2011. At the time, the Vita was intended as a big-budget gaming handheld that, but a lack of support and other issues resulted in it underperforming in comparison to the PlayStation Portable. Now it seems as if the PSVR2 is suffering the same fate.
Abandoned by Its Creator?
One year later, PSVR2’s first-party support leaves a lot to be desired. While Horizon Call of the Mountain was a great launch game, Sony’s lack of interest in making first-party games is noticeable not just to the media but also to the players who shelled out $550 for a headset only for it to collect dust within a year or so of buying it.
An ongoing theme on X/Twitter shows the frustration of PSVR2 owners for wasting money on a headset that not even Sony appears interested in giving the time of day.
Sony: Releases PSVR, forget to develop enough games for it.
— SplashbangOW (@SplashbangOW) February 23, 2024
Also Sony: Develops PSVR2 but forget that they don't have any games for it.
Sony: Let's release PSVR2 for the PC since we have no games for it ourselves and hope some clueless PC Gamers buys it when we finally get around…
Exactly 1 year ago today I wasted $597.43 (including sales tax).
— Ryan McCaffrey (@DMC_Ryan) February 22, 2024
Great hardware with almost ZERO Sony support. I know the PSVR2 stans will come for me (again), but it’s been mostly ports of VR games I can play on PC VR.
Has there been a SINGLE first-party release after day 1?? pic.twitter.com/hA67xUSoiG
Somehow I’m not surprised the PSVR2 isn’t selling well. A $550 accessory for a $500 console you can’t get anywhere where most of the games are ports of last gen games not interesting people? How shocking.
— Xenoveritas (@xenoveritas) January 31, 2023
Nope. Weak level of support, plus PlayStation is already signaling the end of the PS5. And the cost is pretty steep for what it is.
— David Hundley (@dkhundley) February 21, 2024
The lack of AAA support in VR is a recurring issue in the market, with few developers willing to make VR-focused versions of their best games. One of the handful of publishers to make the leap is Ubisoft, but during a recent earnings call, it said that it has no plans to increase investment in VR following the disappointing sales of Assassin’s Creed Nexus VR, which launched exclusively on Meta Quest headsets last year. After all the enthusiasm for Half-Life: Alyx, the anticipated wave of big-budget VR releases has failed to materialize.
One reason for this may be due to a struggle to build large communities. Speaking with IGN, Michael Lee, a Schell Games senior engineer who previously worked on Among US VR, tells IGN that PSVR2, like any VR headset, has an issue with retaining users after the initial launch. “Sony, Meta, Apple, and all of the other VR platforms will need to address how to keep people engaged,” Lee explained. “Whether that’s building unique experiences exclusive to the platform, creating new hardware, or making improvements to make experiences even more immersive.”
In contrast, Jonna Ranta, CMO at VRKiwi, a studio that recently published Survivorman VR: The Descent, said they felt PSVR2 still has a bright future ahead but did acknowledge that Sony could invest more in exclusive AAA games for the device and felt that multi-platform releases for VR games help “ultimately boost” the market.
“We do see that gamers are asking for PSVR2 exclusive AAA titles, which Sony could support more,” Ranta explained. “On the other hand, we believe that a healthy business environment benefits from the content being available on all platforms, which will ultimately boost the whole VR market.”
With PSVR2 currently positioned as an optional accessory for the PS5, it’s unsurprising that VR devs feel that multiplatform releases are more beneficial than AAA exclusives for the VR headset market. Analyst Piers Harding-Rolls of Ampere Analysis told IGN in an interview that because Sony has positioned its VR headset as a support product for the PS5, combined with slow sales means “that third-party VR game devs will be looking at the Quest ecosystem as a less risky proposition.”
It would explain why the COO of Rec Room, a VR game that was reported in 2022 as having over three million active users, said during an AMA on Reddit weeks ago that the team could not “justify” porting the game on PSVR2.
Even for the games that it does put out, though, Sony’s marketing for PSVR2 has a history of being underwhelming. A source at a developer of at least one major PSVR2 release told IGN that Sony would only market their game exclusively with PlayStation Blog posts; any additional marketing had to be done by the developer or the publisher.
“Now, that is the worst business model on the planet right now because the market is so small, and no one's really backing it or getting behind it to do AAA games, which are 20, $30 million starting,” the source explained. “You're not getting any money back ever. You cannot recoup with the amount of people that have VR right now, doing games at that level.”
Beyond that, additional marketing on Sony’s end is compilations of various different games now available or coming to PSVR2. The most recent one was published on February 14, 2024, highlighting games such as Resident Evil 4 Remake's VR Mode, Among Us VR, and Arizona Sunshine 2. With the exepction of Resident Evil 4 Remake VR, a majority of these games are not exclusive to PSVR2 and are found on more affordable headsets, notably the Meta Quest 3. While Sony took a similar approach with the original PSVR, that headset had less competition and was pitched as being a more affordable alternative.
Marketing and a price point aside, the PSVR2 was sold exclusively on PlayStation Direct for the first few months. It was not until May 2023, roughly three months after the headset had been launched that it was made available at retailers like Amazon and GameStop.
Making it more widely available was beneficial but still not enough. Six weeks after launch, Sony announced in its Business Segment Meeting that the PSVR2 had sold nearly 600,000 units. Omdia analyst George Jijiashvili believes that just over one million PSVR2s were sold in its first year. On paper, that does not sound bad, but Sony reportedly made 2 million PSVR2s before release and reduced shipments a month before release. It also lagged behind the original PSVR, which was able to surpass 1 million less than a year after launch and 2 million units by the end of 2017.
What’s more, it appears that the PSVR2 sold poorly during the 2023 holiday season. RoadToVR tracked the Amazon sales of the Meta Quest 2 and 3 compared to the PSVR2 during the holiday season and found that Meta’s headsets significantly outsold the PSVR2.
Due to these factors, Jijiashvili says that the current market share for the PSVR2 compared to the entire Meta Quest headset line, at the end of 2023, the “PSVR2 accounted for 5%” while “all Meta Quest headsets combined accounted for 75%.”
What Happens Next?
Last December, SIE's head of global business said in an interview with Financial Times that the PSVR2 was “a bit of a challenging category right now,” adding that he thought “ there was a higher expectation generally for what VR would do to gaming.”
But a year after release, it’s clear that PSVR 2’s biggest problem is that it just doesn’t have the games it needs to make it worth the price, and it doesn’t look like matters will be improving any time soon. Due to the lack of games that make it a desirable headset, Jijiashvili reiterates his predictions that Sony’s headset is “kind of screwed” in the coming years. Citing the fact that the lack of first-party games, the layoffs, and studio closures affecting PSVR developers make PSVR2’s future look “fairly bleak.”
“I’m expecting 2023 to have been PSVR2’s best year in terms of headset sales – so I’m anticipating year-on-year declines in headset sales in the years to come,” Jijiashvili explained. “Although it’s definitely not too late for Sony to change the PSVR2’s fortunes, it’s now in a very challenging position.”
The one bright spot is that Sony is experimenting with allowing PS VR2 users to play PC VR games on the headset. Should Sony manage to get this compatibility running on VR-ready PC rigs, this opens the door to a library of PC VR games, most notably Half-life: Alyx, which has remained locked to PC VR headsets like the HTC Vive and Valve Index since its release in 2020 and is only playable on Quest headsets through a USB-C cable.
Once this feature is up and running, it will be another way for PS VR2 owners to get more mileage from the headset, playing these games at a higher resolution and (hopefully) taking advantage of its tech-like haptic feedback. Yet, PSVR2 is entering the PC VR market at an awkward time. Jijiashvili told IGN that recent Steam hardware survey data suggests that there is “no significant growth” in that space.
As you can see in the graph above, between March 2020 and December 2024, the VR headset share on Steam shows that Steam users who owned a VR headset “hovered between 1.5% and 2.5%,” which Jijiashvili infers that the number of VR headset owners with gaming PCs using Steam is not keeping up with the rapid growth of new Steam users.
In contrast, Harding-Rolls believes that PSVR2's addition of PC VR support has the potential to be beneficial. “Its positioning is as an incremental business opportunity for Sony and is part of its ecosystem strategy to support the PS5 business,” Harding-Rolls explained. “As such there is less onus on selling loads of headsets rapidly. Future support for PC VR games makes it more comparable to other headsets on the market and will likely broaden its appeal to an extent.”
Currently, the PSVR2 is declining a year later and is at risk of suffering the same fate as the Vita. The support for PC VR headsets opens the door to users to access more games that otherwise are not available on PSVR2, such as Rec Room, or games released on the original PSVR that are otherwise not accessible beyond PC VR helps expand the library for these users. Yet, it does not address the fact that VR is primarily a space full of indie games and not a ton of AAA support, which not even the manufacturer seems interested in investing a ton in.
Sony needs to consider bringing more of its first-party properties into virtual reality. Even if it is not a big-budget release like Firewall Ultra or Horizon: Call of the Moutain, games like a sequel to Astro Bot: Rescue Mission would surely perform well.
Taylor is a Reporter at IGN. You can follow her on Twitter @TayNixster.
