According to a Bloomberg report, Sony has paused the production of new PS VR2 units until they can sell the current backlog of unsold units.
Bloomberg’s anonymous sources revealed that sales have slowed since the virtual reality device’s launch in early 2023. As such, unsold units have been piling up. To date, Sony has made over two million PS VR2 units.
Macquarie analyst Yijia Zhai provided Bloomberg with an explanation of the troubles encountered by PS VR2:
The high price of VR hardware acts as the main hurdle for its expansion. Currently, there are limited games that support VR devices, and that will also lead to lack of motivation for players to purchase VR hardware. This limited content also has a reason – the development cost for VR games is substantially higher than normal titles.
Indeed, despite PS VR2’s great feature set, the lack of games and high price remain a significant barrier to its growth. Moreover, there’s the simple fact that VR devices still haven’t solved the motion sickness issue affecting a significant portion of gamers when wearing a headset. Being in a virtual world might be cool and all, but if you get a headache after ten minutes, the prospect suddenly loses a lot of the appeal.
Still, if you don’t have a problem with that, PS VR2 remains a great piece of virtual reality hardware. Here’s what Kai Powell had to say when summarizing his experience with Sony’s latest VR headset for the review:
Sony’s PlayStation VR2 headset had a lot to prove to justify a cost higher than that of the base PlayStation 5 console needed to operate it. The hands-on test confirms that this is how next-gen should look and play in virtual reality with an experience unlike anything else in the HMD space. Every aspect of the first PlayStation VR has been improved (aside from Cinematic Mode largely remaining as is) with no expense spared for comfort and design. This is the sort of revolution in virtual reality that can showcase not just the experiences that are fun to play but also those that can take advantage of the next-generation console’s power. As new experiences are brought to PlayStation VR2, the value can only improve, but the initial cost of admission may leave some players wanting to take the headset for a test drive first before investing in something the price of a second PlayStation 5.
