Sony’s PSVR2 Strategy Is Actively Harming Virtual Reality

If your eyes glazed over during the obligatory PSVR2 interlude during this week’s Sony State of Play, I assure you you aren’t alone. Even as someone who has covered VR for years and is a big believer in what virtual reality has to offer, I felt myself checking out. Sandwiched in the middle of the quarterly showcase Sony uses to offload its b-tier announcements was a quick string of VR games with increasingly diminishing frame rates. It reminded me of the part in every EA press conference at E3 when some guy named Frederico would get on stage with a soccer ball to promote the newest FIFA. Next!

I mean no disrespect to the games that were showcased. Skydance’s Behemoth, from the team behind the award-winning Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners, looks like a big triple-A sword-and-sorcery epic and the trailer is mighty impressive. The trailer for Alien Rogue Incursion didn’t show us much, and what it did show looked pretty choppy, but I’m a huge Alien fan, so it doesn’t take much to sell me on an Alien VR game.

These games aren’t the problem; the problem is these are the only PSVR2 titles Sony has to show us. If there had been a steady stream of a variety of games over the last year, I’d probably be pretty enthusiastic about this first look at Behemoth. But when I think about the $550 headset that’s been collecting dust next to everyone’s TV over the last 15 months, I can’t help but feel like Behemoth and Alien Rouge Incursion aren’t exactly the games that are going to finally give people the value they deserve and have been patiently waiting for.

I knew the PSVR2 was an overpriced novelty when it launched last year, but Sony has managed to defy even my lowest expectations with its abysmal lack of support for VR. I was critical when the headset launched with Horizon Call of the Mountain as its only big triple-A launch title, but I expected that if Sony was going to invest all this R&D and marketing into VR (again!) it was also going to leverage its massive catalog of beloved IPs to make it all worthwhile. More than a year later that hasn’t happened, and anything we have to look forward to, we could just play on the cheaper Quest 3 with the bigger, better library – Behemoth and Alien Rogue Incursion included.

Where’s Insomniac’s Spider-Man VR? The studio has made some of the best VR games ever and Spider-Man would be a slam-dunk PSVR2 exclusive. Where’s the VR spin-offs for God of War, The Last Of Us, Ratchet & Clank, and Sackboy? Why isn’t the PSVR2 being used to resurrect older PlayStation IP like Gravity Rush, Ape Escape, or Killzone with low-cost new entries? Every time a new State of Play comes around with nothing too exciting to show, it reminds everyone that no one cares about VR, including Sony.

I know game development is more expensive than ever and the market for VR is small, but Sony knew that too, and it still made the PSVR2. Allowing such an expensive piece of hardware to languish without any games to support it does a huge disservice to VR and reinforces all of the negative impressions people have about the VR market. When Sony treats VR as an aside, something forgettable to cram into the middle of a bland showcase, the audience is going to treat it that way too. Sony has positioned itself as a leader in this space with its flashy, high-end headset. Now we’re just waiting for it to start acting like one.

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