Sony has reportedly halted production of PlayStation VR2 headsets due to an increasing amount of unsold units.
According to Bloomberg, Sony has manufactured more than two million headsets to date, but sales have been dropping every month, per the global market intelligence firm IDC.
Shortly after PS VR2’s February 2023 launch, Sony revealed it had sold nearly 600,000 units in the first six weeks, slightly outpacing the original PS VR. Since then, though, Sony has been mum on PS VR2 sales figures, so it’s unclear exactly how it performed in its first year.
Nonetheless, Sony’s silence on the success (or lack thereof) of the headset, coupled with its minimal support for the device, hasn’t exactly instilled confidence. To date, PlayStation has only released a single first-party game for the platform, Horizon Call of the Mountain, and that was a launch title.
Instead, it has primarily relied on third-party games like Resident Evil Village and Synapse to carry the catalogue. What’s more, the device lacks backwards compatibility with the first PS VR, so potential return buyers would lose much of their library, barring any free upgrades that individual game makers were offering. Indeed, it’s that dearth of content that Bloomberg mainly attributes for the apparent lack of interest in the PS VR 2.
Of course, the headset carrying a steep $750 price tag doesn’t help, either. That’s more than the PS5 itself, which is required to run the PS VR2. Other VR headsets, meanwhile, like Meta’s Quest 3, are standalone, so the cost of entry is far lower.
All of these hurdles, coupled with the niche appeal of VR in general, make it easy to see why the PS VR2 has seemingly struggled.
Last month, Sony confirmed plans to bring official PC support to PS VR2 later this year, which is a notable shift from the company’s previous console-only approach to VR. It remains to be seen how that may improve the PS VR2’s commercial performance.
In other PlayStation hardware news, alleged specs for a rumoured PlayStation 5 Pro were recently leaked.
Source: Bloomberg
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