Sony Group Corporation has allegedly put a stop to production of its PSVR2 headset, due to a backlog of unsold units.
The news came from an article by Bloomberg journalist Takashi Mochizuki who claims that sales of the product have slowed ‘progressively since its launch and stocks of the device are building up.’
Citing unnamed sources who are ‘familiar with its [the firm’s] plans,’ Sony has apparently produced ‘well over two million units of the product launched in February of last year.’
This comes just over a year after the PlayStation VR2 was officially launched, catapulting Sony as one of the front runners in the virtual reality gear market. The device, priced at $549.99, allows users to explore reality gaming with PlayStation VR2 Sense technology.
In the Bloomberg article, Macquarie analyst Yijia Zhai offers a reason for the potential lack of take-up: “The high price of VR hardware acts as the main hurdle for its expansion,”
“Currently, there are limited games that support VR devices, and that will also lead to lack of motivation for players to purchase VR hardware. This limited content also has a reason – the development cost for VR games is substantially higher than normal titles.”
Sony has not yet confirmed or denied the halting of production and it is expected that they’re continuing to work on expanding the PSVR2 headset range.
Reality of the video game industry
The Tokyo-based technology giant has faced some challenges recently, as it announced plans to cut around 900 jobs within its PlayStation unit and shut down a London-based studio in late February 2024.
These layoffs affected in-house studios like Guerrilla Games which worked on creating an exclusive game for the headset from its popular Horizon series.
Sony is not alone, as both Microsoft and Tencent-owned Riot Games also underwent significant layoffs in recent months due to a slow recovery in the gaming industry.
PlayStation 5 Pro expected launch in September
Although the PSVR2 headset may not be performing as well as the company hoped, that isn’t stopping them from gearing up ahead of the PlayStation 5 Pro release.
An exact date isn’t yet known, but console fans are trading rumors about a possible date in September of this year. Several gaming tech insiders seem to agree about this rough window which would line up logically with the planned release of Grand Theft Auto 6 in 2025.
It’s reported by industry sources via the YouTube channel RedGamingTech that the PlayStation 5 Pro will feature eight-core Zen 2 CPUs (clocking in at 4GHz), an RDNA 3 GPU at 2.8 GHZ, and 16GB of 18,000 MT/s GDDR6 memory with a bandwidth of 587 GB/s.
Much like everything else, the price isn’t yet known either. In 2016, when Sony released a Pro console after a Slim version, the Pro version cost $100 more. By that logic, the PlayStation 5 Pro could potentially be in the region of $599.99.
Featured Image: Photo by Triyansh Gill on Unsplash
