Almost seven years on from PSVR’s release, as Sony prepares to launch its follow-up, it’s worth considering how far VR gaming has come in that time. In some ways, it’s a very different landscape from the one we faced in 2016. True, Facebook-owned Oculus VR is still the market leader – except that now it’s Meta-owned Reality Labs, and the success of Quest 2 has led it away from chasing bleeding-edge fidelity in favour of a cheaper, lighter and, vitally, untethered approach. Having made its first forays into VR that same year in partnership with HTC, Valve has since struck out on its own with Index, and made what is perhaps the medium’s one truly essential title, Half-Life: Alyx.
In a more fundamental sense, though, things haven’t changed much at all. Quest 2 has sold an estimated 15 million units, and Meta bragged in October that $1.5 billion has been spent on its Quest Store since it opened in 2019 – but look at that latter figure again in the context of games on console, PC or mobile. It’s as much money as EA makes from FIFA sales alone in the space of a year, without counting in-game spending in Ultimate Team. Back-of-then-apkin maths suggests that the average Quest owner has spent an average of around $100 on software in total – in the space of three years. This underlines the fact that, hardware adoption aside, VR still isn’t part of our regular diet. And accordingly, the conversation seems stuck on the same old questions. Will VR’s moment ever come? Could this be it at last?
That in turn puts a peculiar weight on any major developments in the VR space. Carrying on its back the future of an entire medium, each new launch doesn’t just need to be good – the kind of iterative step forward we now expect from a fresh console generation or the latest instalment of a triple-A series – it needs to change the status quo. Quest 2 did. Half-Life: Alyx did. Initial impressions suggest, however, that PSVR2 really has its work cut out in this regard.
It is, however, a considerable step forward from Sony’s previous effort. Now with 4K OLED HDR displays for each eye (compared to 1080i in the original) and leveraging the processing power of PS5, it can easily hold its own against top-end PC VR hardware. It also incorporates Tobii’s eye-tracking tech, which can be used for everything from foveated rendering – allowing the device to focus its computing power on the places you’re actually looking – to direct gameplay applications, more on which later. It’s also the first consumer headset to incorporate head-mounted haptics, applying a little rumble when a game calls for it.
The secret weapon of any VR
