PlayStation VR - $399, October 2016

They were saying on a recent Digital Foundry Direct how they can’t believe Sony is basically just going to stealth release the PSVR2 without much marketing.

Maybe they saw how much Meta is losing and didn’t want to throw good money after bad? But then, if they don’t market it and advertise it, of course it’s going to fail, right?

It’s a peripheral that costs more than the console and the console has been hard to come by until recently. There also aren’t many games coming at launch, and all those games early adopters bought with the previous version don’t work with this one.

It’s not going to be pretty.

It is a bit strange that they didn’t at least try to bring in PSVR people by saying “we know games aren’t compatible between PSVR and PSVR2, but if you bought these first party titles, you’ll get the PSVR2 port for free when it arrives”, or something of that nature.

Haha, this is Sony “Our goal for PlayStation 3 is for consumers to think to themselves, 'I will work more hours to buy one”.

Nothing has changed in the ensuing 16 years.

Yeah Sony is really dropping the ball on this. No backwards compatibility was a terrible decision. Making people pay for PSVR2 upgrades makes it worse.

And no PC compatibility, which is a shame.

I still suspect their hands were tied on straightforward backward compatibility based on the hardware changes, but I completely agree they should’ve been bending over backward to give upgrades where possible and mitigate that.

Somehow PC VR hardware always seems to be backwards compatible, either natively or through the efforts of the community. Sony is a huge company, they could make it work.

Price needs to be equal to or lower than the Quest 2, $400. If Sony can’t make money at that price then they shouldn’t sell it at all. Better than launching a failure.

Alternatively, this finally seems to be the hardware that makes me think I could enjoy VR. I’ll be willing to pay the cost of it as soon as I don’t have a similarly expensive PC hardware purchase to worry about.

That’s been the case for several years now, just buy a Quest.

Not having to worry about connecting to the PS and just having a nice self-contained VR experience just makes Quest 2 a gamechanger really. These PSVR2 decisions are just mind-boggling so it definitely won’t be a surprise when the whole things ends in failure.

Pricing in a vacuum seems reasonable; PSVR1 was $400 7 years ago, with inflation that’s $491 today. So $550 isn’t insane. But no backwards compatibility is a hard sell, and it isn’t in a vacuum, the Quest 2 costs $399.

Is the PSVR2 hardware better? Maybe. Does it result in a markedly superior experience? Maybe that too. But who’s going to compare head to head? It’s all about the games, and there the Quest 2 wins by a mile. Hell, so does the PSVR1. That will change over time, of course, but it’s murdering their launch.

That’s fair. OLED + better hardware + the eye tracking/foveated rendering combo are the big difference maker for me. I won’t be buying it right away so I’ll be able to see what the software support ends up being, but full GT7 VR is already a tempting enough experience.

I’ve bought entire consoles just to play a single game before, so if you’re lusting after GT7 in VR. go for it! Of course once you go down that rabbit hole you’ll need a wheel, shifter, and pedals too. And a frame to mount everything. And a room to put it all in.

I already have a wheel and pedals! And I basically got into the Playstation ecosystem because I bought a PS4 just to play God of War. So yeah, single game console purchases aren’t unheard of for me.

Actually, not only are many PSV1 games getting ported, but many of those have free upgrades too. Some have paid upgrades. Some still don’t have an announced upgrade path. The “not backwards compatible” is a bit outdated now.

I think the main issue might be the Move controllers. Unlike most VR, PSVR1 went with very different control hardware. I’m guessing that plus the dramatic jump up in tech makes compatibility a non-trivial development. But again, many games have now announced compatibility. Nearly all of the games I care about are transitioning to PSVR2 and I don’t think any of those are paid upgrades (although Beat Saber is still unknown if it will have a cost). If just a few more make the list, my PSVR1 will be retired.

If it were like 200 dollars cheaper I would be in just for GT7, but my past experience with VR is that at some point I don’t feel like dealing with setting it up. At least on the PC it means slogging through a bunch of apps… Finding out my controller batteries are dead. Finding that the game doesn’t run properly without tweaking this and that. I just have no patience anymore for that stuff. Obviously on the PS5 it should be more plug and play, but man it’s pricey.

Also my experience and why I sold my 2 headsets so far. I hope the ecosystem will have settled down by next time.

If games have to be ported to work, that isn’t backwards compatibility. The distinction doesn’t matter if everything is ported, otherwise it does.

That’s great news. I’d like to see it succeed. I saw a headline saying Sony has said there’s over 100 PSVR2 games in development, so even if you include PSVR games that are getting updates so that they work on PSVR2, that’s still good news.