It seems that pricing has backfired: perhaps it shouldn’t have been that the VR headset that requires a console costs more than the console itself!

The PlayStation VR2 has been available to buy for over a month. Sony has so far failed to provide a single shred of data on sales of its next-generation virtual reality device (which they SHOULD report in their quarterly report for January-March, and will officially announce towards the end of April…). The situation is not rosy, Bloomberg reports based on an estimate by analyst firm IDC.

IDC claims that Sony has managed to sell less than 300,000 units of PlayStation VR2 in a month and that the device will sell around 270,000 units by the end of March. I suspect a price cut on the PSVR 2 will be needed to avoid a complete disaster for their new product. Consumers around the world are facing rising costs of living, rising interest rates, and increasing layoffs. VR headsets are not top of mind for most consumers under the current economic climate,” said Francisco Geronimo, vice president of data and analytics at IDC.

Earlier this year, Bloomberg reported that Sony had planned to ship 2 million PlayStation VR2s in the launch quarter, then halved that. The company was planning to ship 1.5 million for the next fiscal year (which starts tomorrow and ends a year from today). Sony has refuted it but is reluctant to comment on IDC’s estimate. After these events, it’s hard to take the statement by Sony’s CFO Hiroki Totoki seriously (by the end of 2019, the company sold 5 million PlayStation VR units, and the new model could surpass that…).

If the PlayStation VR2 could be used standalone (Sony should take a few notes from the example of Meta Quest), we could accept the price to some extent (600 euros, while the PlayStation 5, which is REQUIRED for the headset, is 550. You could build a solid, VR-capable PC for €1150…)

Source: VGC