Until now, the PlayStation VR2 has been a pretty darn good VR headset. Well over 200 games are currently available with several impressive releases like Horizon Call of the Mountain, Gran Turismo 7, and the duo of Resident Evil Village and Resident Evil 4 Remake. But the headset now has an insurmountable problem: Sony no longer cares about it.
Sources close to Android Central have revealed that Sony is making deep cuts to funding for VR games. While I’ll paraphrase for anonymity, my source was told that there will be very few opportunities for VR game development at Sony going forward.
To back that up, another source informed me that only two PSVR 2 games are in development at Sony. Given the state of the games industry with constant layoffs and studio closings, I don’t exactly feel confident that even these games will ever see the light of day if Sony continues on its current trajectory.
AC thVRsday
In his weekly column, Android Central Senior Content Producer Nick Sutrich delves into all things VR, from new hardware to new games, upcoming technologies, and so much more.
I should have seen the writing on the wall when Sony’s Insomniac Games studio got hacked in December 2023, revealing the fact that the company wasn’t working on a single VR game for Sony’s flagship VR system, the PlayStation VR2.
That’s important because Insomniac Games, maker of the Spider-Man series, Ratchet & Clank, Spyro the Dragon, and several other well-known and successful properties, made four games for Meta’s (then Facebook) Oculus Rift platform. Three of those games were very well received, and many consider Stormland to still be among the very best open-world VR games playable on PC today. Yet, Sony has them working on exactly zero PSVR 2 games.
Last year, Sony released just three PSVR 2 games and has yet to officially announce even one first-party game coming out for the system in 2024, let alone in 2025. Of those three games, Firewall Ultra developer First Contact Entertainment has since shut down. To add insult to injury, Sony then closed down London Studio in February — a team responsible for another of the PSVR’s highest-rated games, Blood & Truth as well as the PlayStation VR Worlds demo disc.
Even Firesprite, the developer behind the excellent Horizon Call of the Mountain, has seen substantial budget and personnel cuts and even game cancellations. That doesn’t leave much for Sony’s first-party development studios.
Sources close to Android Central have revealed that the company only has two first-party PSVR 2 titles in development.
Fast forward to the May 2024’s State of Play, Sony’s Summer gaming showcase that revealed all sorts of fun games including a brand new Astro Bot title that fans have been salivating for. The original Astro Bot Rescue Mission is the highest-rated PlayStation VR game of all time and was recommended as a must-play for any new PSVR owner for as long as that system was supported.
The trouble is that the sequel doesn’t have any kind of VR support at all. Games like Astro Bot take years to make, which tells me that Sony gave up on the PSVR 2 a long time ago. These decisions aren’t made arbitrarily, and while it’s perfectly within a studio’s right to decide its own path forward, the evidence makes it clear that Sony no longer has interest in supporting its VR headset.
Total lack of vision
When Astro made an appearance on May’s State of Play showcase, I immediately got excited. Astro is such a lovable character, and the appearance of the PS5 controller on-screen — with Astro riding it, no less — certainly looked like PSVR 2 support was in the game. That is until I noticed there was no PSVR 2 logo at the end of the trailer. Only the PS5 logo.
Unfortunately for me and every other PSVR Astro fan, a recently published interview on Digital Trends confirmed that the company isn’t planning a VR mode for Astro Bot at all. No DLC, no update later down the road, no VR. What a stab in the back for what made Astro popular in the first place.
The sequel to the best PSVR game doesn’t even have PSVR 2 support. Talk about a stab in the back.
When Giovanni Colantonio asked why, he was given this incredibly disingenuous response Team Asobi studio head Nicolas Doucet:
“We’re focusing 100% on PS5. Rescue Mission was great fun to make. Every medium has its strong points. In the case of a third-person game, whether you work on TV or VR is radically different. This idea that we could add a VR mode is not applicable to this kind of game. It’s applicable to some first-person games like racing, but not for this kind of game. So our choice was to go 100% for TV to really have as many people as possible playing this game.”
Yet, studios like Flat2VR have proven that modifying games made for TVs isn’t all that difficult. Popular PC modder Praydog released a new app in January of this year that turns any modern Unreal Engine game into a VR game with just a few clicks.
To prove its worth, VR gaming streamer Paradise Decay used Praydog’s app to turn Sony’s Sackboy PS5 platformer into a lovely VR title, viewable in the YouTube video below.
Some of this can be chalked up to Sony’s overall strategy shifting. As of June 2024, the company now has two CEOs as it split the PlayStation business into separate hardware and software divisions, and Sony’s software CEO seems to have a very narrow-minded vision of the future of PlayStation as a brand.
What happened to hybrid AAA?
In January 2022, Sony executives were said to be focusing on a hybrid AAA strategy, meaning AAA games like Horizon, Uncharted, The Last of Us, Spider-Man, and potentially other Sony games could see a VR mode launch alongside the regular version of the game. In the case of Resident Evil Village and Resident Evil 4 Remake, the VR version came just a few months after the TV version launched.
But other than Gran Turismo 7, we haven’t seen nor heard of another hybrid AAA game from any of Sony’s studios. If any game should have seen the treatment, it was Astro Bot which we obviously already covered.
So if Sony has all but abandoned dedicated VR games and doesn’t seem convinced that hybrid AAA games will work, what’s left? Because of some absurdly stupid software limitation, there’s no backwards compatibility support for original PSVR games and Sony already told fans to forget about ever getting it. Scratch another thing off the list.
So how about PC VR support? Earlier this year, Sony announced that it would make the PSVR 2 work on PCs. Just after it virtually wrung its proverbial hands of the PSVR 2 in the State of Play showcase, Sony finally detailed the PSVR 2 PC adapter, which would cost $60 and be available on August 7.
The problem? All of the tentpole features of the headset won’t work on PCs. That includes HDR, headset vibration, eye tracking (and eye-tracked foveated rendering), adaptive triggers, and controller haptic feedback. All that and you’re still tethered to your PC with a USB cable and a dongle box that looks like it came packed with the original Oculus Rift from 2016.
At this point, we need to just forget the PSVR 2 even exists. Sony already has. You’re far better off getting yourself a Meta Quest 3 this year which has exclusives like Batman Arkham Shadow, Hitman 3 VR: Reloaded, and Just Dance VR, to name a few.
Plus, the upcoming Meta Quest games list is far longer than the PSVR 2 list and includes many AAA games like Skydance’s Behemoth, Alien: Rogue Incursion, Metro Awakening, Metal: Hellsinger VR, and maybe, just maybe, even Grand Theft Auto VR.
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