At the time, I internally drafted two theories from this quote. Firstly — and this is the one I’ll admit I was ready to assume — it could be seen as Sony trying to take a graceful exit from the VR market. It’s a strange move to paint the future of VR as some far-flung thing only to announce a new headset less than four months later.
The other theory I’ll explain after this more recent quote, given to GQ on the day the PS5 VR headset was announced.
“We believe in VR and have been extremely happy with the results with the present PlayStation VR and think that we will do good business with our new VR system for PlayStation 5. More importantly, we see it as something beyond this coming iteration that really could be really big and really important.”
This quote aligned pretty perfectly with my second theory, which was that PlayStation doesn’t see its second PSVR headset as a game-changing device that will deliver “the future of VR”. Again, perhaps a bit of a strange way to talk around your upcoming product that you want to sell a bunch of units for, but it’s an undeniably astute point, one that suggests Sony understands how much further its work with VR has to go.
Console peripherals, by their very nature, don’t sell as well as the consoles themselves. Even success stories like the Kinect for Xbox 360 only make up a fraction of the overall install-base in their lifetime. It’s enough to make a tidy profit as a side-hustle — or in Ryan’s words, “good business” — but we all know that VR as a medium is destined for bigger and brighter things than sidekicks to home consoles. Ryan’s quotes seem to acknowledge this and suggest that, even as Sony builds towards PS5 VR, it’s planning future iterations that will broaden the company’s standing in the VR industry far beyond what PSVR 2 can do.
The Future Of VR At Sony
That quite likely means a standalone headset of its own, and perhaps not one as intrinsically tied to the PlayStation brand itself, but instead developed across the entire Sony Corporation. Speculative as that may sound, there is precedent for this; in August of 2020 the wider Sony Corp in Japan posted a job listing to work on a VR headset “with a view to five years from now”.
This makes a lot of sense. Sony is, after all, a multi-faceted company with bleeding-edge TV, camera and audio products, not to mention a motion picture division to boot. All of these arms extend to VR in one way or another, and VR’s real potential lies not just in gaming but also productivity, fitness and film, areas that PlayStation as an entity isn’t as closely associated with (though I would love for the future of work to be on the PlayStation).
I can’t wait for PSVR 2 (or whatever it ends up being called). I can’t wait to be playing big, AAA games with refined motion controls and superior graphics. And I’m optimistic that it will have a healthy life, strong enough to support the game developers that take a chance on it. But gaming is only one small part of “the future of VR”, and it seems like Sony at large understands this. As a result, its VR ambitions may well grow beyond PlayStation itself.
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