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Oculus has extended the olive branch to Sony and has officially gone on the record saying that they’d love to share VR games with Sony’s popular Playstation VR platform in the future. In an interview with Kotaku, Jason Rubin, who is the VP of Special Gaming Initiatives at Facebook and Oculus, says that he would love to make a trade with Sony on VR content. This makes sense since both companies have been heavily invested in not just VR technology, but VR content as well.
Both Oculus Studios and Sony’s first-party VR initiatives have produced some of the most amazing virtual reality content on the market, both creating them in-house and funding 3rd party developers like Insomniac and Ready at Dawn.
Insomniac studios is well-known for lots of traditional 2D gaming titles like Ratchet & Clank, Spyro, Sunset Overdrive, and the latest Spiderman game on PS4. They’ve also created incredible VR titles like The Unspoken, Edge of Nowhere, and the upcoming Stormland. Ready at Dawn made a name for themselves with successful ports like Okami and PSP-exclusive content like Daxter and God of War, the PS4 graphical masterpiece The Order: 1886, and with later VR releases like Lone Echo and the upcoming Lone Echo II.
It’s these types of heavy-hitters that have folks flocking to the virtual shelves of the Oculus Store by the millions, according to former co-founder of Oculus, Luckey Palmer. We’ve seen an incredible response to the company’s latest standalone headset, the Oculus Quest, both commercially and critically, with first-month sales topping 1.1-million according to Facebook.
Facebook doesn’t normally release numbers for its Oculus hardware division, so to see them gloating about the sales figures of the Quest in any way speaks volumes about its potential success and market reach as an individual platform.
Sony, meanwhile, has recorded nearly 5 million PSVR headsets sold for the Playstation 4 and currently holds the award for best-selling premium VR headset experience when considering officially-released figures. Oculus 10-million strong number may beat that, but there’s no official backing behind this number and it likely includes more GearVR headsets than premium Oculus branded ones.
Sony confirmed that the PSVR ecosystem will be available on the next Playstation console and that the current PSVR headset itself will even work with that system. It’s confirmation that neither company has any interest in backing off funding for VR any time soon, and is still going full-force in with its efforts.
Sony’s own efforts include amazing exclusives like Firewall: Zero Hour, Farpoint, Until Dawn, Astro Bot Rescue Mission, Resident Evil VII, and the upcoming Blood & Truth, just to name a few. Many of these are mature-themed titles that are full-length games and fulfill the “requirements” that many gamers have when considering whether or not a platform has “real games”. Seeing any one of these in the PC space would be a major win for any company that could secure the rights, and Playstation VR owners would be more than happy to see Oculus-exclusive content on their platform as well.
Whether or not the PS4 platform can fulfill the requirements of some of these games remains to be seen, but that’s not necessarily speaking on a hardware level. Games like Beat Saber, which are mainly driven in the social media sphere by custom songs and maps, don’t have such features on the PSVR versions but do have them on PC-driven headsets and even the ultra-portable Oculus Quest. There are hurdles to overcome, but Oculus seems to be willing to try to overcome them.