Earlier this month,I went on a bit of a screed against Sonyover the way it handled the PSVR 2. As a VR believer, it’s tough to watch a leader in the game industry neglect its own VR hardware the way Sony has over the last year. When an entire medium is routinely declared dead on arrival by the broader gaming public, Sony’s lack of support for the PSVR 2 only helps to build that case. If VR does end up failing, Sony’s contribution, or lack thereof, will have played a significant role in that failure.
This week,Android Central’s Nicholas Sutrich reported that Sony is making “deep cuts” to funding for the PSVR 2. According to anonymous sources who spoke to the publication, “There will be very few opportunities for VR game development at Sony going forward”.
Reportedly, there are only two VR games in development at first-party Sony studios right now, but it’s unclear what those games are and who is developing them. We know it likely isn’t Insomniac, since no VR games were revealed in last year’s leaks. We definitely won’t see any new games from First Contact Entertainment or Sony London, the studios behind Firewall Ultra and Blood & Truth, as both were recently shuttered. Outside of multiplatform titles like Behemoth and Alien: Rogue, it’s unclear when, or even if, we’ll see any more games on the PSVR 2.
Sutrich attributes some of this to a recent corporate shakeup at Sony. In June, PlayStation was split into separate hardware and software divisions, and with that change came a new strategic agenda that, evidently, didn’t include VR. Sony will do whatever it think is in the best interest of the company and its shareholders, and it’s totally free to dump a $600 VR headset onto the market with no plans to support it long term, but if you ask me, PlayStation fans deserve better than this, and Sony has a responsibility to make things right.
No one is getting the value they expected out of the PSVR 2. It may be a decent headset with nice features and a few hundred ports, but people that bought the PSVR 2 were expecting to play VR PlayStation games on it. As of today, that library includes Gran Turismo 7, Horizon Call of the Mountain, The Dark Pictures: Switchback VR, and VR support for Before Your Eyes, Resident Evil Village, and Resident Evil 4. We know War Thunder studioGaijin Entertainmentis working on a PSVR 2 exclusive called Aces of Thunder, and that’s it.
I don’t think the people who bought a PSVR 2 expected it to be a paper weight a year later. You could argue they should have, given how poorly Sony supported the original PSVR, but even that headset had 34 exclusives. It seems unlikely the PSVR 2 will get even ten. Even in traditional gaming, exclusives are becoming a thing of the past, but the PSVR 2 is double the price of the Quest 3, and it’s tethered. People bought it because they wanted to play PlayStation games, and if I was one of them I’d feel pretty scammed right now.
I have called on Sony to issue refunds in the past for its terrible handling of theHorizon Forbidden West PS5 upgrade, in which Sony raked in millions from people who overpaid for the physical version of the game, but this situation is even more unsavory. People that bought the PSVR 2 put a lot of trust in Sony. They saw what happened with the PSVR, maybe even invested in one themselves, and still gave the company another chance. They paid a huge premium on a headset for a lackluster Horizon game and the promise that there would be more to come, and now there aren’t.
These people are Sony’s most loyal customers and it needs to make some kind of gesture to make things right. I’d never expect full refunds, but account credits, free games, even PSN subscriptions would go a long way to acknowledge that the way Sony has so quickly abandoned this hardware is a terrible way to treat its customers.
More than likely though, Sony won’t do anything. In other kinds of business, this type of thing would be a huge mark against a company. Customers would think twice about supporting a business that releases expensive hardware with no plans to support it long-term. It’s a shame that most will blame VR instead of Sony in this situation, and it’s likely Sony knows that, too. The right thing to do is to offer every PSVR 2 owner a free copy of Astro Bot and an apology. What will Sony do instead? If its PSVR 2 plans are any indication, probably nothing.
