There have been a lot of signs that Sony hasn’t been investing a lot of resources into VR, specifically its PlayStation VR2 headset. According to a new report, the situation might be worse than previously believed. In an Android Central article published Thursday, sources said that Sony was slashing budgets related to VR and that there would be “very few opportunities for VR game development” in the future. Another source mentioned that there were only two PSVR2 games in development at the company.
While Sony didn’t respond to any of the claims in the report, fans have noticed the lack of attention being paid to VR. At PlayStation’s most recent State of Play, there wasn’t a single first-party VR game announced or highlighted. While we got looks at Alien: Rogue Incursion and Behemoth, due out this year, both are from outside studios.
It seemed possible there could be a first-party game incoming from the Astro series, which has always utilized PlayStation hardware in ways other games don’t, and was used as a tech demo for the PlayStation 5 at release. Plus, Astro Bot: Rescue Mission was an excellent VR title for the original PlayStation VR. However, following up on the Astro Bot reveal during the presentation, Nicolas Doucet, Team Asobi studio head, told Digital Trends that a VR mode was unlikely. “We’re focusing 100% on PS5,” Doucet said. “Rescue Mission was great fun to make. Every medium has its strong points. In the case of a third-person game, whether you work on TV or VR is radically different. This idea that we could add a VR mode is not applicable to this kind of game. It’s applicable to some first-person games like racing, but not for this kind of game. So our choice was to go 100% for TV to really have as many people as possible playing this game.”
Sony hasn’t said a lot about VR publicly, but it hasn’t ignored it completely. Executive Eric Lempel told Barron’s (via VGC) in October 2023 that VR was an important category for the company, but that it had a lot of room to grow, saying it was a “nascent business.” It’s also been working on expanding who can use the headset, recently announcing an adapter for $60 that would let users connect it to their PCs. Unfortunately, many of the headset’s features won’t work when connected to PC.
