Sony's PSVR2: More Stutter (update on prior post)
PSVR2 is finally going on sale on February 22, 2022. That's a lot of twos for the PSVR2... 220222. It's also a palindrome, okay kind of cool.
But as reported in The Verge the price is $549, so together with the PS5 that's around $1000 for a tethered headset that can only be played with Playstation content. And, since it's tethered, only in whatever room you happen to have the PS5 placed.
Not long ago, they also announced they only sold 20M PS5 units (although The Verge reports they Sony updated that number to 25M) and their production target for the PSVR2 would be 2M units. That's a sad number, almost as sad as Pico 4 selling less than 50K units in a month in the world's largest consumer market, China. While I get the logic behind the 2M units, it's basically double the attachment rate of 5% that PSVR had to the PS4; the overall numbers prove to me one thing: the era of console gaming is coming to close, the era of VR gaming has begun.
Quest 2 has already sold more units than either the Xbox (both S and X combined) or PS5. If there were holdouts for the PSVR2, the Quest 2 sales may jump even further come March 2023 unless Sony can demonstrate the content really is good enough to justify having PSVR2 rather than getting a headset with a ton of fun games and more being added every month.
I get it, everyone hates Mark Zuckerberg and Meta is a stupid name (not my opinion, but that's how a lot of people seem to feel about it). But the bottom line is, Quest 2 is THE NEXT THING in gaming and both Sony and Microsoft's offerings are stale.
Sony Is Coming but with More Stutter than Swagger
Based on a recent article on Road to VR, Sony reduced its P25 Sales forecast for 2022, and the PSVR 2 delayed to 2023:
https://www.roadtovr.com/report-psvr-2-rumored-release-early-2023-missing-holiday-season/Estimated sales through EOY will be around 30M units. Assuming an additional 15M units for 2023 we can estimate PSVR 2 capture at a high, mid, low sales volumes.
45M PS5 Sales EOY 2023 - PSVR2 Sales expectation assuming no production delays:
Low (5%) 2.25M
Mid (10%) 4.5M
High (20%) 9M
That said, given their current ability to produce consoles -- which is a strange failure on their part to predict Semicon constraints, strange since they are famously building a commercial EV -- it's unlikely Sony can produce sufficient numbers of units. A revised number accounting for production delays could significantly lower their sales potential for PSVR2 through 2023:
Low (1%) 450K
Mid (2.5%) 1.17M
High (5%) 2.25M
Either way, this places PSVR2 squarely in the top seat along with Meta's HMDs and pits the companies head-to-head for dominance in the VR market moving forward. However, considering the laggard pace of console development versus the break-neck speed of Meta's device rollout (new ware every two years), Sony's got its work cut out for it. PSVR2 will no doubt make a dent in Meta's share of the HMD market (currently 70% or thereabout), but a better question perhaps is can Sony pivot to an independent "Metaverse Console" that can match the pace of innovation? Naturally, they have the capacity to do so as demonstrated by their mobile phones division, but whether or not they can transfer that capacity to this new market remains unclear and, frankly speaking, doubtful.