PlayStation VR was officially launched late last year and brought the concept of VR gaming to the mainstream. Whilst VR technology is certainly impressive, it has struggled to really take off given its lack of great games and expensive price tag. The release of PlayStation VR has certainly given the tech a massive boost and it seems PlayStation gamers are really embracing Sony’s take on virtual reality gaming.
As TheVerge reports, Sony has now sold over 1 million PlayStation VR headsets. It was announced earlier this year in February that the headset had sold over 900,000 units and now it has reached the million milestone in just under four months. This means the PSVR headset is now ahead of its two main rivals, the HTC Vive and the Oculus Rift. However, it is still behind the Samsung Gear VR, which has reportedly sold over 5 million units since it launched in late 2o15.
Sony Interactive Entertainment America president and CEO, Shawn Layden, felt the technology still needed to reach more PlayStation gamers. “It’s still just a million units,” he said. However, he went on to express his belief that the headset will continue to sell well, partly due to increased availability. “We’ll have freer supply in the marketplace,” he said of 2017. “We got to a point around Christmas where you would be hard-pressed to find VR anywhere. So we dialed back some of our promotional activity at that time because we didn’t want to be promoting a platform for people to find out they couldn’t get it. I didn’t want to create more unhappy customers.”
A number of games have been released for the headset but few that have really felt like system sellers. Resident Evil 7: Biohazard does support the VR headset and is certainly one such game that will encourage gamers to embrace the technology.
We recently saw the release of Farpoint and the Aim Controller. Layden believes this will see the start of a “second wave” of games hitting the market. “When a new console or a new platform launches, there’s a lot of activity driving launch day,” he said. “And then there’s the inevitable lull between that and the next launch of titles. I think we’re seeing that happening now. Farpoint is the lead of that, and we’ll be talking about a number of other titles at E3.”
The future of VR may be uncertain, but it seems bright. As Layden said: “With VR, it’s a totally brave new world. We’re still trying to understand exactly what people are going to want to do in that medium. It’s hard to make predictions about it. People will want it to be smaller, lighter, wireless — these are all things we’re looking at from a conventional iteration process. But I don’t presume to be able to tell you what VR is going to look like in the year 2018 or 2019. We’re going to find out together as we go along.”
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