This week we learned that ahead of the pre-orders opening on November 15 and a February 2023 release date, the price of PS VR2 would be a whopping $550. Considering you can pick up a PS5 for $400-$500 and the original PSVR is $400, many analysts – including my colleague and VR nerd Nick Sutrich – are finding that the PS VR2 is overpriced is to encourage high sales and developers.
I can certainly see the value of these arguments. Meta has sold 15 million Quest 2 headsets because it launched for $300 and didn’t require a computer or console to power it. After Meta raised the price by $100, console sales fell, according to the latest Meta earnings report. But current Quest owners have taken their savings and invested in the Quest Store, where over 400 games have grossed over $1 million.
For Sony, the hurdles of PS VR2 price and PS5 requirement could easily result in lower hardware and Software sales, which in turn would discourage VR developers from backing out of the Quest.
Bloomberg reports that Sony plans to manufacture 2 million PS VR2 headsets within a month of the headset’s launch and sell them all within a year. But to sell that many would require about 8% of its 25 million PS5 owners to buy in (or a slightly lower percentage if you factor in console sales in 2023). But only 5% of the 116 million PS4 owners bought the original, cheaper PSVR over its lifetime.
Taking all of that into account, selling a large number of PS VR2 consoles is a huge challenge that I’m not sure Sony can pull off. So how do I specify the PS VR2 price? is not too expensive you might ask? Because a cheaper PS VR2 would not guarantee success and because for many gamers 550 euros is still a bargain.
PS VR2 will succeed where PC VR and Quest cannot
Wired VR games objectively look better than anything a mobile Quest device can do. An example of this is that we called the new Iron Man VR port for Quest “perfect” in our review, but when you compare its visuals to the original PSVR version, the latter looks far better despite its advanced age.
With a powerful PC or console, you can add ray tracing and other awesome effects to a game that will look like a PS2-era title on mobile Quest. It’s a difference that’s best seen between the low-res Resident Evil 4 VR Quest port and the gorgeous Resident Evil Village that’s coming to PS VR2. The same goes for most PC quality VR games like Half-Life: Alyx.
The problem is that PC VR games just don’t sell very well. Buying a $1,000 Valve Index, or even something cheaper like the HP Reverb G2 or the Quest 2 with a link cable adds to spending thousands on a gaming quality rig. And then, with every title you buy, you’ll have to tweak your settings to make them work with your PC’s specs. It’s intimidating and expensive!
While PC VR gaming may remain a niche hobby for enthusiasts, the original PSVR simplified things because it ensured all of its games were designed to its exact specifications, so no tinkering with the settings. It just had to contend with VR’s early reputation and its own first-gen issues like poor controller tracking and a blurry 1080p screen that didn’t do the graphics justice.
The benefit of the PS VR2 is that you get its powerful PS5 hardware – 8 3.5GHz cores, 10.28 TFLOPS, 16GB of memory with 448GB/s memory bandwidth and so on – and every game is played for exactly developed these specifications. It’s a more accessible version of PC VR with the same visual quality but half the price for both the headset and the “computer” without tinkering with settings or worrying about your PC becoming obsolete.
While many of the upcoming PS VR2 titles are already on the Quest, they’ll look and perform better on Sony’s headset by leaps and bounds. Exclusive titles like Horizon Call of the Mountain, Village and No Man’s Sky could never work on a mobile headset and give the PS VR2 an important recognition value.
A total of $1,050 is still more than many players are willing to pay up front. But for PS5 owners tempted by VR but don’t have a gaming PC, spending just $550 more doesn’t seem unreasonable compared to the alternatives. Especially considering how the PS VR2 beats the Quest 2 in so many areas.
Sony makes no compromises
If you compare the PS VR2 to the Quest 2, you’ll see all the ways Sony could improve the headset since it didn’t require a dedicated processor. The per-eye 4K HDR, 110-degree field of view, deep black OLED lenses with 120Hz support, and redesigned Sense controllers with advanced triggers and haptics are cutting-edge for a device at this price point.
And that’s not even factoring in the PS5-assisted performance, which should be excellent. Also, thanks to dual internal cameras for eye-tracking, PS VR2 games can support foveated rendering, which we know from a Unity developer panel can hugely boost GPU frametime and CPU thread performance for PS VR2 games .
Of course, the only obvious downside is the cable attached to the console, making the PS VR2 unsuitable for room-scale gaming. But for gamers who prefer to sit down or don’t have big rooms for VR, they’ll be compromising here for better specs elsewhere.
To match the $299 sticker price, Meta gave the Quest 2 a terrible strap that couldn’t support its weight, a foam cover that gave people skin rashes, and other design compromises that meant people were spending hundreds on accessories needed to get the best experience. Even then, this year, with no upgrades, the price was bumped up to $400 in hopes of making more profit.
We look forward to Meta Quest 3 arriving in 2023 with an overhauled chip, pancake lenses, and full-color mixed reality passthrough. But to hit the estimated $500 price tag, it had to bring back the same uncomfortable strap and ditch the eye-tracking found in the Quest Pro, according to leaks. It’s still going to be a compromised consumer experience to keep it affordable on its own.
Basically, Meta, through a very tricky balancing act, tricked consumers into believing that VR could be both affordable and good. And Sony shouldn’t follow the same path if it wants to be successful.
No more room for a cheap VR gaming accessory
There’s a reason almost no well-known VR headsets cost less than $500 these days, aside from the Quest 2 and Pico 4, and headsets like Daydream and Oculus Go have died out — not to mention Google Cardboard. The cheap mobile VR fad has died down and consumers have been demanding that they pay more for better quality and immersion rather than less for accessibility.
The original PSVR was budget-friendly, but issues like obnoxious tracking with the Playstation camera led to a pigeonholing of how developers could program for the headset. Sony has addressed that this time with inside-out tracking, but also future-proofed the headset by adding eye-tracking, which currently only Enterprise and Prosumer headsets have.
Sony could sold a stripped down PS VR2 with a more industry standard resolution and no eye tracking for an aftermarket price. But players know that you buy what you pay for.
All of the above upgrades ensure that the PS VR2 doesn’t become irrelevant before the PS5 lifecycle ends in a few years. It might even jump to the PS6 at this point if Sony knows about backwards compatibility.
My colleague Nick Sutrich argued that the sticker shock will make the PS VR2 a “niche add-on” that developers will ignore until the few owners stick their headsets in a closet. This could happen! But I think it’s more likely that people will abandon it if the industry is rapidly going beyond its capabilities or if it was too cheap to work the way it was supposed to.
By poaching Meta’s impressive collection of Quest 2 games, Sony is offering these developers a new revenue stream, Quest players the ability to re-experience their favorite titles with much greater immersion, and new VR players a massive library of established greats at launch. Add Playstation Studios games and even some of the best PS5 games to get VR optimization, and gamers have reason to believe they’ll have more than enough games to justify the cost.
That optics that the PS VR2 costs more than the console it powers certainly looks bad. But I expect the same PS5 owners who’ve been scouring eBay for consoles and obsessively following Matt Swider tweets for the latest online console drops will shell out $550 if Sony makes the headset convincing enough made to buy.
Now we just have to review the headset this February and see if Sony has succeeded.
#VR2 #expensive
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