this post was submitted on 29 May 2024
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I agree with you on the second paragraph for sure. That's a code issue here. But I suspect that a decision maker holding a budget at a development company, is going to struggle to want to spend development dollars on a product that has saturated 1% or however many percent of the market (we all know it's super low).
There's really only three ways to increase saturation though, to incite development: 1 - Create a product that's a must have, which this pretty clearly isn't. 2 - Target a core part of the market and bombard them with marketing and special pricing, which they pretty clearly aren't. Or the ol' usual go to, 3 - Cut the price to a level where people will make spur of the moment purchasing decisions to buy the product. 3 being about the only way, yet Sony has done none of this.
I remember buying the PSVR back in 2016, and while driving home being like, "Jesus did I really just spend $600 CAD on this?" If this same headset was $199 or maybe max $299 CAD, this wouldn't even be a conversation and my dumb ass would probably have a PSVR2 downstairs right now, as would many many other people. It would be the ideal Christmas present for many people and kids at that price, especially when some of us have cranky wives that ask us what we want for Christmas, and we always just say I dunno, don't worry about it. You'd probably would have way more games being developed too, because the thing would probably sell a heck of a lot better. Which brings me to my main point, if they can't deliver the mainstream headsets in this sort of price range, I kind of question the feasibility of VR as a whole. No one wants to effectively pay for the equivalent of another PlayStation for something that is mostly novelty and of questionable lifespan/usage.
Good points on the saturation thing. My experience in the vr space is that most companies aim right at the middle of all of those goals and fail as a result. The price ends up lower, but not low enough. Software is supported, but not enough. Software is targeted but then turns out underfunded.
In my opinion, Sony should have created a headset targeting $300-$400 and then focused not on just making random good VR games but play off of existing titles.
The reason that works so well is that many people have a favorite PS5 game, why not offer 3D models viewable in VR? Or the maps? Or a shot minigame mode with small bits of content for a low price? These things are relatively cheap to do but have a huge impact on gamers wanting to get into VR.
Resident evil is a great example of this. The Horizon game less so. Either way, use those titles all the time to your advantage. Try to get a VR camera mode in more 3rd person games. Promote VR movies and streaming maybe.
You still have this issue though of pivoting out of a catch-22. No software, no gamers, no money, so no software or hardware. The way to break out of that is by maintaining a library of games and adding to it over time as adopters get on board. This is why them ditching PSVR1 killed the second headset. Build that library to a tipping point like SteamVR and Meta are working on, don’t abandon it.
Sony could’ve done a lot of things to help this push honestly and they did nothing. It’s like none of these companies even know how to exist in experimental spaces anymore and it shows big time.