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NeoGAFs Kent Brockman
"People are returning, and buying new stuff -- that never happened before in VR"
Virtual reality has a perception problem. For anyone who has followed the re-emergence of the VR market, it's simple en…
www.gamesindustry.biz
Ndreams CEO Patrick O'Luanaigh has always put forward a slow-and-steady philosophy, despite pivoting to VR all the way back in 2013. O'Luanaigh is predictably enthusiastic about the future of the market, and until last year's launch of Oculus Quest, that kind of enthusiasm was often dismissed as wishful thinking. Before then, the market's one unqualified success story was PlayStation VR.
"PlayStation VR has done really well all the way through," he says. "You can look at Sony's sales numbers, and it's one of the few companies to actually announce headset numbers -- which is frustrating... We've got pretty accurate internal estimates [for the size of the entire market] we think, but it's frustrating."
That opacity has been central to VR's perception problem. When the size of the market is obscure even to those who have invested their livelihoods in serving it, one can reasonably ask what there is to hide. For O'Luanaigh, however, what we can see provides enough evidence of progress; Sony confirmed five million sales of PSVR headsets at the end of 2019, and that is just one part of the audience that VR developers can now reach.
Sony has reached that milestone despite PSVR being perhaps the least advanced headset that isn't expressly designed for mobile. The next version of PSVR could be a huge boost for the market, and O'Luanaigh believes that Sony is happy enough with the response from its high-spending core audience to make a second iteration a very strong bet.
"I think Sony knows that, if VR is going to continue beyond the next year or two, they need to update their hardware," he says. "Because it is dated, and it will be even more dated by then. I'd be very surprised if they didn't continue to support VR.
"But I wouldn't expect it to be announced at the same time as PlayStation 5. This year the focus has to be on the core of the business... so I think they'll be all over PS5 this year, and when that's solid, I think that's when you'll see what they're doing."
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