Well, as soon as I saw that the Pro and it would launch at the same time, it seemed like they were betting on two horses in a same race. PS4 owners would hardly buy both at the same time, so a lot of users would be faced with a choice: upgrade your PS4 or get PSVR. I would say that Sony isn't quite confident that VR will be a success so they put more of their marketing muscle on the Pro, 4K and HDR. The low stock probably means that they did not saw a lot of potential on it. They had 3 new platforms: Slim, Pro and PSVR. One was betting on people being cheap and don't caring about graphics, other was betting on people being more interested in graphics and 4K and the other was betting on VR. They really didn't had how to lose in all of them, they just threw it all and waited to see what would stick.
I'm a big detractor of VR in general and I said multiple times in this forum that it will most likely follow the same path that 3D did and be quickly forgotten. Vive bombed. Rift bombed. If PSVR bombs then this thing is dead. VR is ridiculously expensive, clumsy, makes people feel sick, demands a huge and ridiculous helmet that will not let you do anything else while playing (like checking your phone). It's basically everything that made 3D bad but 10 times worse. Of course, it has a bigger visual impact than 3D, but I really think it seems destined to follow the same path. HTC will end up discontinuing Vive with those sales, Oculus will probably focus on cheap mobile VR to please Facebook and Sony will probably put it in the same place they left Move and focus on PS4 Slim and Pro.
| DirtyP2002 said: How can MS build, ship and sell 8 million Kinect sensors and Sony struggles to do the same with 1 million PSVRs? Same for Nintendo and the NES Mini btw. |
Mind that the difficulty to manufacture those is not comparable. Kinect is just a pair of IR cameras and an IR laser blaster. PSVR needs two high-definition low persistence displays, several imaging components, the image processing box, etc. PSVR also costs more than 3X the price of Kinect, showing that it is clearly a more complicated product.
And of course, probably Sony imagined that PSVR would not sell well. Being out of stock also doesn't mean that it would sell 2M if it indeed was. Kinect was more certain, specially because it was so much cheaper.
