According to a Bloomberg report, Sony is reducing production of the upcoming PSVR2 VR headset. The reason for this is the disappointing pre-orders, writes the business magazine. The forecasts for the launch have been “dramatically” reduced. Sony has been accepting pre-orders since November 15, 2022.
Specifically, Sony has halved its delivery estimates, according to the Bloomberg report. In the current quarter, Sony now expects to ship around one million units of the headset. Previously, Sony had targeted 2 million headsets and hoped to boost the VR gaming space with PSVR2. Sony is currently hoping to ship 1.5 million headsets from April 2023 to March 2024, in addition to those planned for the current quarter.
PSVR2 costs 600 euros
Sony is thus faced with the opposite problem of the Playstation 5: the game console has been sold out since its market launch in autumn 2020 because Sony was unable to meet demand with its production capacities. The matching VR headset PSVR2 would now have the capacity, but there is apparently no demand – according to Bloomberg, Sony has already informed its production partners that orders for components will be lower than originally planned.
Sony’s PSVR2 will go on sale next February and will cost 600 euros. This makes PSVR2 significantly more expensive than the previous model, which cost 400 euros when it was launched in 2016. Because even then the mainstream success of VR gaming failed to materialize, the announcement of PSVR2 initially came as a surprise. Like the previous model, PSVR2 inevitably needs a Playstation console – in this case the Playstation 5.
Sony not only put its resources into the development of the hardware, the company also had suitable VR video games produced. These include the rail shooter “The Dark Pictures: Switchback VR”, the city building simulation “Cities VR – Enhanced Edition” and the puzzle game “Hello Neighbor VR: Search and Rescue”. They should be available at the market launch of the VR headset. If the VR success is still missing, it will become even more difficult in the future to win game studios for the production of large VR titles.
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