| Normchacho said: 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. |
Virtual Boy comes to mind, but I'm just digging up a dead horse. This is 2016 where VR is actually viable tech.
The unprecedented nature of PSVR is arguably in the price as an add on, which may indicate that it's still a bit too early. While my natural response to Sony's $400 announcement price was positive, the reality is $400 is still the price of their new "Pro" console. Paying $400 for an add on peripheral (that technically replaces one's HDTV for gaming, but most still need/want a HDTV and regard PSVR as a peripheral) is a big pill to swallow for the average game console consumer, particularly if they're buying on merits like hype and curiosity.
In retrospect, PSVR could be considered a bit of a soft launch as it seems selling more PS4s appears to be Sony's priority for the 2016 holiday season. And this makes marketing sense as they should be focusing on what is available to buy in 2016 with the PS4 as a matured/mid-life platform, rather than on the merit of all the VR projects in development that they hope convinces consumers to buy the VR hardware today.
The problem with that slow burn approach is that it never becomes any sort of focal point for the Playstation brand, which may end up relegating it to an expensive peripheral that was more of an experiment, receiving only moderate sales.
Unless PSVR gets that one big "get a second job" level killer app in 2017, preferably multiple of them, slow burn may be all the peripheral ends up doing.
