Newsletter
Sony has sold 4.2 million units of the PlayStation VR kit for the PlayStation 4, according to a Tweet from Sony Interactive Entertainment president Shuhei Yoshida. This figure would put PSVR squarely on top of the VR market, as far as individual pieces of hardware go. While taking things on a platform basis and looking at PC-based VR versus phone-based VR versus standalone VR hardware could make things look a bit different, the fact remains that Sony’s headset is the hottest in the space right now.
Alongside the news of the sales milestone, Sony also announced a big wave of new games coming to the platform later this year. Spring and summer will see 14 new games hit the platform, just to account for the ones in Sony’s announcement. These include longstanding Sony favorites like Everybody’s Golf, formerly known as Hot Shots Golf, along with VR offshoots of pop culture hits such as Five Nights At Freddy’s and No Man’s Sky, which will undoubtedly be well-served by the extra immersion. Also noteworthy is indie game Luna, developed by a star-studded team that includes credits on The Sims series, as well as PlayStation hits Journey and Flower.
PlayStation VR’s dominance isn’t really all that difficult to fathom. It’s marketed as a premium experience, complete with multiple control methods, and works with hardware that many gamers already own. Price, on that note, is also a strong point; the PlayStation VR kit, if you already have a PlayStation 4, runs cheaper than any other full-fat VR solution out there. Other VR solutions are either close to the price of the PSVR in the self-contained space, offer typically inferior phone-based experiences, or have to be hooked up to a PC with a decent graphics card and other powerful specs, a hardware proposition that starts well into $600 territory, and can quickly go into the thousands. That goes double for laptops, a space of gaming hardware that’s picking up steam despite pricing that’s easily twice or even thrice a comparable desktop in some cases.
Once you’re past the main hardware the system has to hook up to, you also need to look at peripherals. The most popular PC-based VR headsets can be sold with or without their controllers, and those can be pretty pricey on their own. While using a normal PC game controller is an option, it’s typically not as well-integrated as the DualShock 4 support found in PSVR titles. PS Move, meanwhile, is cheaper for a set of controllers than almost any other VR system out there, and they have functions outside of VR. From a purely economic standpoint, PSVR is the obvious choice for anything more premium than Google’s Daydream or Samsung’s Gear VR platform.
Going forward, expect Sony’s commitment to VR to grow as its clout in the space does. Many popular games coming out now boast VR support in some form, even if it’s just extra features. Indie developers that would have stuck to the PC scene will likely start making the jump to the much more penetrating PSVR platform en masse, helped along by the ease of porting Unity and Unreal Engine 4 projects across platforms.
4.2 million PS VR sold thru!
PlayStation VR: The Next Wave of Games Coming in Spring and Summer 2019 https://t.co/b0BRceHR3D
— Shuhei Yoshida (@yosp) March 26, 2019