8 Reality check
As Sony preps its next-gen PSVR technology, what does the future of VR gaming look like?
With Sony’s next-gen PSVR announced and controllers revealed, what’s the future of VR?
At the beginning of the year, with VR support on its new console rather shaky, it looked like Sony might have followed in the footsteps of many tech firms before it and simply given up on its VR ambitions. As it stands, playing PSVR games on a PS5 requires ordering an adaptor from Sony and, in some cases, separately installing the PS4 edition of a game alongside its current-gen equivalent. With that in mind, it’s understandable that PSVR releases have been thin on the ground in terms of brand-new dedicated VR titles, with ports of older games from other platforms and VR modes in games such as Star Wars: Squadrons feeling like meagre compensation.
In February, though, the mood changed, with the confirmation of a nextgeneration PSVR system. Since then we’ve had, if not quite a deluge of information and releases, then at least a persistent drizzle. A March event revealed a raft of games for the current system, and we’ve had our first glimpse of the next-gen VR controller, which combines DualSense features such as adaptive triggers and haptic feedback with an ‘orb’ design much closer in style to Valve’s Knuckles and the Oculus Quest controllers. With our PlayStation Move controllers now marking their birthdays in the double digits, a wellearned retirement is finally on the horizon.
Details about the headset are more sparse. We know it will be able to track the controllers without the help of an external camera, and Sony has promised improvements in all the areas you’d expect – resolution, field of view, input – although hard specs are absent for now. One crucial change for anyone who’s wrestled with PSVR is that the new model will connect to the base PS5 hardware via a single cable.
Sony has confirmed the hardware won’t be launching in 2021. According to George Jijiashvili, principal analyst at Omdia, “we expect PSVR 2 to be released in the last quarter of 2022” – in line with the original PSVR’s October 2016 launch. So, what can we expect the VR market to look like at that point?
Primarily, it’ll be dominated by Oculus. The platform holder isn’t talking numbers, but according to SuperData estimates, the Facebook-owned company sold over a million Oculus Quest 2 headsets in Q4 2020, the highest sales it has recorded to date for any VR device not powered by a smartphone. (Samsung’s Gear VR holds the overall record, having sold 1.4 million in Q4 2016 – a number that wasn’t enough to stop Samsung pulling all support for the platform in 2020.)
Oculus’s lead is only going to widen, it seems. Omnia projections have the new PSVR selling under a million units in 2022 (a number that is, admittedly, curtailed by its expected release date falling late in the year). In comparison, Oculus Quest devices are forecast to sell 2.3 million, contributing to an active installed base of 5.2 million in 2022. By 2025, Omdia foresees an active installed base of 13.7 million for Oculus Quest, compared to 4.7 million for the new PSVR.
The main reason for this discrepancy? Chiefly because Oculus Quest is a standalone headset – that is, one that doesn’t rely on an external device for its processing power. Ahead of its announcement, there was an expectation that Sony might follow suit with the next PSVR, but clearly it doesn’t want to sever the link with PS5.
“Wireless would have been nice,” Jijiashvili says, “but I think a single-cable solution is the next best thing.” He’s not surprised that Sony has decided to go the tethered route, requiring a PS5 to play its VR games. “You have to remember what PlayStation is about.” Namely, selling consoles. Sony has attempted standalone products before, after all – and as it prepares to permanently close its PSP
The next-gen PSVR controller combines DualSense features such as adaptive triggers with an ‘orb’ design
and Vita digital stores this summer, it doesn’t seem to be in a rush to try again.
Still, it’s hard not to wonder whether this puts the next-gen PSVR on the wrong side of history. Everyone we speak to agrees that standalone devices are the future – perhaps with a supplementary tethered option, as offered by Quest 2. At the farthest reaches of its forecast period, in 2025, Omdia predicts 16 million sales of standalone VR devices, versus 2.5 million for tethered ones. (That 16 million figure is “conservative”, Jijiashvili says, if the market for standalone VR really takes off in China.)
There’s certainly a lot of developer excitement around the standalone model, and its current exemplar. Barry Meade is director and CEO of Fireproof Games, whose signature puzzle-game series took its first step into VR last year with The Room VR: A Dark Matter. “Without moves by Oculus to expand VR gaming,” he says, “The Room VR would likely not have appeared for a few more years yet.” 17-Bit founder and CEO Jake Kazdal is even more enthusiastic. “I think the Oculus Quest 2 is the first mainstream VR device.” 17-Bit’s current project is VR survival game Song In The Smoke, launching on PSVR and Oculus devices. “It’s plug-and-play, it’s affordable, there’s a bunch of content available,” Kazdal says. “It’s the iPhone of VR.” It’s a comparison we hear a lot.
Tadhg Kelly likens the current state of VR to the Windows Phone devices of the early 2000s. “Not the smartphones – the ones with the styluses,” he says. “Almost like a Palm Pilot, where you were trying to get your email and it was all being charged per megabyte. You could kind of see where it was going, but it needed a step change.” His analogy is, of course, leading to the introduction of Apple’s iPhone. “The shift from what came before to that involved three or four things all happening at once.”
Kelly has firsthand experience of trying to make that shift happen. He was formerly senior partner manager at Magic Leap, helping to develop apps for the AR platform; he now works as a consultant on gaming and XR (extended or cross reality – a catch-all term for VR, AR and mixed reality). And in the years since Oculus literally kickstarted the current wave of VR, he says, there has been movement on all of the technological fronts holding adoption back: display technology, battery life and refresh rates.
What made Apple’s phone such a revolution, though, was that it solved all the issues with pre-existing smartphones in one swoop, causing sales to explode. Nearly a decade into this VR wave, a single device coming along and drawing such a clear line in the sand seems a little unlikely. There’s another model, though, for how VR might grow: consoles.
There’s no question that consoles are a mainstream product, but their userbase is a relative niche next to smartphones and PCs. This is the obvious point of comparison for Sony, but also seems to be the model Oculus has in mind, at least for the short term. It’s recently introduced processes borrowed directly from console makers, Kelly says – “content guidelines and approval gates and quality bars”.
The numbers make more sense in the context of the console market, too. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Oculus parent company Facebook, has repeatedly set out ten million users on a single platform as VR’s tipping point. Omdia expects Oculus Quest to hit that figure in 2024 – but even then, Jijiashvili says, “VR will still be a tiny consumer entertainment product proposition.” By 2024, the analyst predicts a VR installed base of 37 million. It’s a fraction of the console base (212 million) but both are dwarfed by PC (2.3 billion) and smartphone (seven billion). “It’s a sliver, really.”
“I think everyone has to be realistic about the pace at which VR will develop,” Jijiashvili says. Even in the best-case scenario, he says, “VR is not going to be mass market in ten years’ time, I don’t think it will be mass market even in 2030. It’s going to be a gradual build towards that.”
This is where the story often ends. A glance at the distant horizon where VR finally becomes ubiquitous, too far off for us to imagine clearly right now; perhaps a note of scepticism that, as Kelly puts it,
“this was last year’s future”. But what about right now?
For hardware makers, the current situation doesn’t seem sustainable. Huge user growth will be required to justify the amount of investment currently being poured into VR – investment that will continue to be necessary if VR wants to develop beyond the technical issues currently holding it back.
But a number of studios are making respectable money from VR games already. According to Oculus, as of February, more than 60 titles (around a third of the total on its store) had generated at least $1 million in revenues, and six of those had broken the $10 million mark. One such success story is The Room VR,
which has sold over 250,000 copies to date. “When we initially released, we hoped to make our money back in the first year, but to our surprise we more than doubled it,” Meade says. After years working as a mobile-first developer, Fireproof has found that VR “can be as lucrative” as mobile, Meade says. “But then again, A Dark Matter ended up as a bit of a hit, so your mileage may vary.” For most developers, success on VR depends on a single factor: funding from a platform holder. “A lot of projects that you see on their platform are paid for by Facebook,” Kelly explains. At the Oculus Connect event in 2016, two year on from Facebook’s acquisition of Oculus, Zuckerberg announced it has invested $250 million in VR content, and pledged to spend the same again.
17-Bit is one of the studios to benefit from this massive investment. Song In The Smoke’s development has been fully funded by Oculus and Sony, in collaboration – one of the first examples of this happening, Kazdal believes. “They were able to meet and say, ‘We’re both going to benefit from this, the whole VR community is going to benefit from bigger titles like this, let’s just make it happen’. And for that, I’m eternally grateful.”
The existence of Song In The Smoke,
at least in this form, was entirely down to this funding. “It’s kind of a win-win – I
For most developers, success on VR depends on a single factor: funding from a platform holder