PlayStation VR is the best-selling non-mobile VR headset so far, with an attractive price point and low hardware requirement that drew people to it over the holiday season, in spite of an anaemic (IMO) lineup of available content. Less capable than Oculus' Rift or HTC's Vive, PSVR was nonetheless more popular, and was being touted by some as the VR rig that would help drive widespread adoption.
So it's a little weird to see articles popping up like this one, from Upload:
Community Download: Is Sony Pulling Away From PlayStation VR?
Sixteen days ago we exited what many people were calling the “year of virtual reality.” 2016 was considered to be the year that VR finally made the transition from science fiction fantasy to a real consumer product available at your local Best Buy. Last year, the Oculus Rift (Facebook), HTC Vive (HTC and Valve) and the PlayStation VR (Sony) all debuted, and Samsung just announced 5 million of its Gear VR headsets have shipped. The PS VR in particular was anticipated as the guaranteed success of the tethered headsets. With a plug-and-play install base of around 50 million PS4s, and the monolithic might of Sony behind it, it was the best bet the VR industry had. And yet as 2017 begins, the question must be asked: is Sony already beginning to pull away from PS VR?
Now before you all start tying your move controllers into nunchucks with which to bludgeon me to death, let me explain myself. No one is saying that Sony is abandoning its newborn platform a couple months after launch. There are, however, some eyebrow-raising things to consider. Lets knock them out one at a time.The list includes Sony's closure of Guerrilla Cambridge, their own (i.e. first party) VR studio; the recent failure of PlayStation Vita and PlayStation Move, demonstrating their willingness to cut bait rather than keeping fishing, if consumers fail to bite; and sales that ended up being well below projections, something which is currently bedevilling VR across the board, which would seem to indicate that consumers aren't biting.
And that's not the only article of its king to come out in the last few days -- check out this piece as well, from Forbes:
Is Sony's PSVR Doomed Heading Into 2017?
Everyone is buzzing over the Nintendo Switch right now, but I wanted to cast my attention backwards to a piece of hardware that came out just a few months ago, Sony’s PlayStation VR. Despite debuting in October 2016, the first console-based VR headset seems to have almost disappeared completely from conversation in the industry.
Sony themselves certainly isn’t talking about it much. Despite being more than happy to boast about how PS4 and PS4 Pro have now amassed over 50 million sales, they have yet to publicly comment on how many units PSVR has sold. Sony has previously said that sales for PSVR are “on track,” but will not explain what that means, exactly. Later, Sony’s Kaz Hirai elaborated a bit more to Daily Star Online:
“We've always said it's going to be a slow start, unfortunately, we did produce a lot of units but we ran out of stock in some retailers, but I think based on reports coming out of the holiday season, we're actually happy with the numbers.
"One of the reasons we're not talking about the numbers so much is because we don't want the numbers to take a life of their own."
The “life of their own” the numbers would take on is presumably a story about how PSVR is not exactly tearing down the house when it comes to sales. SuperData Research previously revised their estimates for 2016 sales of PSVR from 2.6 million to 750,000, which is still more than Oculus and HTC, but obviously nothing to brag about, given Sony’s silence.
Now, it's early days yet for PSVR, and it's still possible that the thing could still catch fire, but I'm still seeing all the same problems with PSVR that I see with VR as a whole (i.e. too many unresolved technical issues, with not nearly enough compelling VR-exclusive content to drive adoption), with the added problem that the PSVR package leans heavily on cameras and controlled from the aforementioned PlayStation Move... which flopped.
Is PSVR the next PS Vita? Is it doomed? Only time will tell, but...
Let's just say I have a bad feeling about their chances.