Exclusive: PSVR 2 sales surge over 2,000% after Sony's huge price drop
Update: Sony PlayStation VR 2 has sold out at Amazon, as sales spike for the PS5 VR headset. Here's the story of how things changed in just 24 hours.
📈 Sony saw a 2,350% rise in PSVR 2 sales yesterday, based on our data
💰 The PSVR 2 price went from a steep $550 to $350 ($200 off)
🤷♂️ After 24 hours, PSVR 2 has completely sold out at Amazon
📆 It originally launched Feb 2, 2023. Sample data is from January 1 to now
🥽 Many PS5 gamers found it too expensive before and had few VR games
🔜 Aug 7: Sony plans to open up PSVR 2 to PC games with an adapter
The price of the Sony PSVR 2 was always too high, and further proving that widely-held theory, we saw sales of the PS5 VR headset suddenly skyrocket on Sunday.
The timing is no coincidence. Amazon had the PSVR 2 for $200 off and, according to the exclusive retailer data seen by The Shortcut, sales of the PSVR 2 skyrocketed by 2,350% over a 24-hour period. In fact, there were more PSVR 2 sales on Sunday than in the first seven months of 2024 combined. Amazon is now sold out, but we’re still seeing the VR headset in stock at Walmart.
Walmart and other US retailers followed suit with their own price drops after Best Buy (which was first) and Amazon (second) reduced the prices on Sunday morning. So the surge in PSVR 2 sales wasn’t limited to just Amazon.
What happened to PSVR 2?
The PSVR 2 launched on February 2, 2023, with a lot of promise. It had the potential to bring well-known PlayStation game IP to virtual reality when few other VR headset makers had established in-house franchises. Sure enough, Sony launched Horizon Call of the Mountain alongside the headset and over 30 PSVR 2 launch titles.
However, besides adding a VR mode to Gran Turismo 7, there haven’t been a lot of truly standout PSVR 2 games from Sony or third-party developers. Instead, we’ve seen a lot of ports straight from Meta Quest and, recently, VR games like Hitman 3 VR Reloaded skipping the PSVR 2 altogether. The one hope is that PSVR 2 will get PC support on August 7, opening up the VR headset to more games.
Where is God of War, Uncharted or Spider-Man in VR? These should be top PSVR 2 games.
How PSVR 2 got caught in a downward spiral
The biggest setback for PSVR 2 has been the lack of first-party support. Where are God of War, Uncharted, and Spider-Man in VR? These should be top PSVR 2 games.
Instead, most of Sony’s budgets have been dedicated to the best PS5 games, and it makes sense if you’re a video game developer trying to appeal to the widest audience possible. The PS5 install base is much larger – Sony has sold nearly 60 million consoles, according to the company’s most recent earnings call.
What I keep hearing from developers in these cases: “Why make a game for a fraction of the audience?” In a chicken or egg scenario, gamers aren’t willing to invest in a VR headset that isn’t going to have a lot of games in the pipeline.
What I keep hearing from gamers I interview, meanwhile, is they feel as if they “just spent $500 on a PS5.” It was nearly impossible to buy Sony’s console due to the PS5 restock shortage in 2020 and 2021. Sony’s inventory woes have been coming back to haunt them. Add in the fact that it was cheaper to buy a PS5 console vs a PSVR 2 at launch by $50 (for PS5 Disc) to $150 (for PS5 Digital). PS5 Slim has an MSRP of $500 and is now on sale for $450, so another $550 has been seen as unfathomable.
The new $350 PSVR 2 price (Sony hasn’t confirmed if this price is sticking around) shows that there’s an appetite for VR gaming among PS5 console goers. But it can’t cost more than the PS5 console itself and there has to be software to play.
PlayStation going forward
The bright spot is that we reported on how the PlayStation Portal is the top-selling gaming accessory of 2024 so far, even though there was PS Portal restock chaos that made it impossible to find in stock for its first six months.
With Sony due to announce a PS5 Pro console this fall (likely in September) and PSP 2 handheld in 2025, gamers I talked to hope that its launch-day pricing strategy is more like the $199 PlayStation Portal than the $550 PSVR 2.
Next story: Our Sony Bravia Theater U review
Awesome HMD, my favourite of many I've owned. Haptics and HDR are game changers and will be about the best you can get for that price on PC too (or even higher) due to being OLED which, for me, is VITAL for any kind of VR feeling good.
While I bought a PSVR2 at launch, I've been very disappointed by Sony's lack of development on it. The fact that the new Astrobot game doesn't even support PSVR2 as an optional mode (all first party games should be following in the footsteps of GT7, where the game supports both non-VR and full-game VR). I also own a Quest 3, and in general games on PSVR2 are better (Moss 2 and Star Wars:Tales from Galaxy's Edge for example), but the cable makes it harder to play some games, so the first party games that already use controllers would be natural fits for this - imagine the sense of scale God of War could have in VR.
Sony needs to make the price drop permanent, push the production costs down through the great volume sales they'll get with the PC adapter, and focus on adding VR patches to as many first party franchise games as possible. The GT7 experience is such a great example.