Maybe the end really is in sight for consumer VR, again.
Sony is rumored to have temporarily halted manufacture of their PlayStation VR 2 headsets.
As shared on Reddit by user Fidler_2k, a new Bloomberg report claims that Sony has seen sales for their VR headsets consistently decline since its launch last February 22, 2023. They are now reportedly stuck with a large amount of unsold stock, a little over a year later.
Its generally well known that consumer VR, including AR, continues to be a huge risk for the video game industry. While several players have successfully sold a few million units since Oculus relaunched the product line in 2019, consumer adoption remains unsatisfactory, and clearly below expectations. The hope companies in VR like Sony and Meta have is that they will be in a leading position when the technology finally succeeds in getting mass adoption.
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Of course, VR could not have been immune in the turbulence of the video game industry. Meta publicly disclosed layoffs in their metaverse division last October, and Sony’s ongoing round of layoffs has already included their London Studio. London Studio had produced PlayStation VR Worlds and Blood & Truth for the 1st PlayStation VR.
IDC’s Francisco Jeronimo believes that VR is slated to recover with growth of 31.5 % annually between 2023 and 2028, with help from the Apple Vision Pro. But this prediction flies in the face of their own data showing PSVR2 shipment declines in every quarter.
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Macquarie analyst Yijia Zhai gave an explanation to why VR is struggling to get mass adoption.
“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.”
VR really has been in development since the 1970s, but it wasn’t available to consumers for most of its history. Instead, its use has been in sectors like the automotive and flight industries, military simulations, and medicine.
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The push to make VR a consumer product faltered for many of the same reasons it isn’t taking off today. That is in spite of the many advancements that has made VR easier to manufacture and to sell to a general public.
But then, it is common for the video game industry to hitch their ride on a trend that doesn’t really have a future behind it. It remains to be seen how long Sony and its competitors will keep pushing VR until they decide that that bold future where everyone will be in that metaverse is just never happening, and simply burst that bubble.
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