| maxleresistant said: I don't know for the US, but here the PSVR was available everywhere from day one. There was no shortage, or the shortage only lasted a day or two. The demand wasn't that high, that's all, and it's normal, the PSVR is really expensive and not really useful, at least at the moment. In my opinion, 750k is more than it deserved. Now, they should focus on bringing more content, satisfy owners of PSVR, bringing in more buyers. Analysts saw the VR as some booming technology, it's not, like I always said, it's starting as a niche technology, it's going to take a long time to be wildly popular, or maybe it never will be. And like I said countless time, Sony should stop being dumbasses, and put a Sony logo on their headset and call it the Sony VR, make it compatible with PCs. |
It's currently available at $399 MSRP on Amazon. I've yet to see piles of them sitting unbought at retail, but my guess is that it's a lower order item compared to say the PS4P.
As for Sony shifting focus to selling headsets as opposed to selling the Playstation brand, I'm not sure I'd agree with that. Goldman Sachs had an initial BoM of the PSVR set at about $350, meaning Sony may actually be losing money on each unit sold, which implies they made the hardware as cheaply as they could with existing supply lines and available tech without making any serious design/spec compromises (co-processing unit).
Sony decides to start losing money by selling headsets to a competing market and the risk they run is exposing the inferiority of their product to the VR competition in a head to head comparison.
Consumers can let that go if they are already part of the PS4 consumer base, or they simply prefer gaming through the Playstation environment, but if Sony starts competing directly with say Oculus, then there are one of two ways to get consumers to purchase potentially inferior tech (based upon specs): either sell it for significantly less than the competition as a poor man's option (SCE may already be losing money on headsets) or sell it along with apps that were previously only available to their PS4/Playstation audience. In the case of the later, the legitimate question becomes "then why do I need to buy a PS4?"
