A reader is upset at the price of the PSVR2 and frustrated that Sony has been spending time and money making a VR headset in the first place.
So now we know. The PlayStation VR2 will cost $550/£530. Now, some people will tell you this is actually quite a good deal for the amount of tech that’s packed into it, especially considering it comes with proper controllers and no need to buy a separate webcam. Those people are correct, and it is indeed a good deal… if you’re rich and don’t mind that there doesn’t appear to be any decent launch games.
Let’s just discuss that for a second before I get into the rest. Why is the PlayStation VR2, something nobody asked for or expected at this time in the PlayStation 5’s lifetime coming out in February without any games? Horizon: Call Of The Mountain seems to be the most high profile game, and it is due out next year, so why not just wait for that to be finished and then launch the headset then?
It doesn’t matter if the headset comes out in February, March, July, or December. Its potential audience isn’t going to change, nobody was sitting there waiting for it to come out at a specific time. And it’s not as if February is like November, right in the middle of the Christmas rush, it’s a usually empty month when nothing is going on. But I do think there is a reason Sony is determined to release the PlayStation VR2 then and it’s a very simple reason: they’ve gone crazy.
I’m not even sure I’m being sarcastic. Obviously, a whole company can’t just go insane but there’s no other explanation for how Sony has been acting these last six months. The almost complete lack of communication, no new game announcements even though they’ve obviously got a load on the way, and the fact that even when they have got something to say they do it via a couple of paragraphs on a grotty little blog… I don’t know how much the PlayStation marketing team earns but I can only assume it’s being heavily augmented by secret payments from Microsoft.
It’s the PlayStation VR2 that gets me though. This must have been planned well before the pandemic. Which means that someone thought that the best thing to plan for the PlayStation 5’s second year (remember, this was supposed to be out this year) was a massively expensive headset and not, you know… normal PlayStation 5 games.
Even without a global energy crisis and financial meltdown how on earth does that make sense? Of all the things to waste time, money, and manufacturing on you choose something that is ultra expensive and only ever going to be of niche interest to a small group of people. How many extra games could’ve been made for the cost of the R&D and manufacturing of PlayStation VR2? How many extra games could developers have been working on if they weren’t stuck making VR ones?
PlayStation as a brand has two main draws: it’s cool, cooler than Xbox, and the first party games are a lot better than Microsoft’s. Sony’s already destroying the first concept with their wall of silence and now they seem hellbent on ruining the second (don’t even get me started on live service games!).
The pandemic started in full force in early 2020, so at that point Sony would’ve known that the financial world would be in trouble for a long time, but apparently at no point did anyone think that maybe putting the PlayStation VR2 on hold might be a good idea. And now we’ve got a peripheral that costs more than the console itself, coming out at the exact time people are going to be worrying if they can pay both their energy bills and their mortgages – genius timing!
I’m upset about this because I own a PlayStation 5 and I’m getting increasingly worried that Sony has lost the plot. I’m worried they’ve lost all common sense and I’m worried they don’t seem to care and are not listening to fans. There’s currently so little on the horizon to look forward to and so much to worry about…
By reader Pressure
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