Did Sony Doom the PSVR?

[Normchacho]

DirtyP2002 said:

Zoombael said:

Ooor... maybe...

 

1. It's hard to make a proper sales projection for a technology new to the market in the long term. Initial demand might be looking high, but there is no indicator of how the particular product will fare in the future.

 

Which brings us to..

 

2. Sony is a not a non-profit-organisation. They re trying to do businees and not go bankrupt in the process. Therefore they look for the best route to sell the product long term wise, not overproducing, not underproducing, being well aware that demand initially won't be satisfied, but also taking small risk of sitting on stockpiles (storage costs) of unsold units, disassembling of production lines/facilities...

 

 

1.  As I said: Their market research really sucks. You just agreed with me.

2. I agree and they failed to do it right.

 

I think that Sony could have made so much more out of PSVR. Release a MUST-HAVE AAA game this holiday season for it.
Something like the new God of War or whatever. Big budget, Big franchise, big marketing and make it THE VR game everyone wants to play and make it an exclusive.

Ramp up production, bundle it with the Pro and just market it like you would really care about it.

 

Sony didn't do anything with it. In fact I think they gave Rift / Vive and Xbox a chance to not fight an uphill battle against them when it comes to VR.

1. There's no precident for a console VR launch. Hell, there's barely any for a consumer VR launch of any time. They had very little information with which to decide how to go forward.

2. I'm sure they could have made 5 million units, spent 10's of millions on a big AAA game, and advertised the crap out of PSVR. But it would have failed if they did.

The expertise does not yet exists to be able to confidently say that anyone could even make a must have AAA VR game. The tech is just too new, and developers are still learning how to use it. Beyond that, it takes years to make AAA games and they would have pissed off fans of whatever series they used to try and push PSVR.

Instead, they made what they thought would be enough units, advertised it in accordance with how many units they would have available, and spent money on making several smaller games for people with different tastes.

Sony has said over, and over again that VR is going to be a slow burn. Maybe people should start listening.