Sony CEO Jim Ryan announces new VR system for Playstation 5

Breathing heavily, Agent 47 applies the sniper rifle, on the roofs of a huge skyscraper in Dubai, takes aim and pulls the trigger. Hit the bull’s eye, job done. Feeling like a contract killer for once and simply taking out unloved targets – this is made possible these days by the action game “Hitman 3”, a video game series about a super-killer bred in the laboratory.

And their missions are playing out as intensively as never before. For the first time, the creators have given the game a VR mode. This stands for “Virtual reality” and takes video players with appropriate accessories completely into foreign worlds. As a rule, glasses with built-in screens are necessary for this. Scenes then take place immediately in front of their own eyes and gamers no longer see anything else except the digital world.

There is only one problem: the VR breakthrough simply does not want to succeed, although it has been predicted for years. Because the corresponding equipment, in addition to a game console or a highly equipped gaming PC, usually costs several hundred euros. According to the poor sales figures, the supply of games is also poor – the market is too small to justify the development of expensive games.

Planned doubling of sales by 2032

The move is at least partly surprising. While the PlayStation 4, which was launched in 2013, has sold around 115 million units so far, Sony has only been able to sell around five million VR headsets since the start of sales in 2016. That’s only about four percent compared to the number of consoles sold.

Looking at the retail price of 399 euros, this is still a good result, but Playstation VR does not play a real role in Sony’s marketing measures. None of the announced PS5 exclusive games so far rely on VR.

After all, experts continue to assume that VR has what it takes to become a product for the masses. While 3.2 billion US dollars were still implemented in the consumer market in 2020, it is already expected to be 6.2 billion in 2032. In recent years, revenues in Germany have also increased significantly, but are still in the low three-digit million range.

Success even in times of crisis

A problem that car manufacturers or mobile phone manufacturers are currently also struggling with. “We are working very hard to expand production so that we can provide a console to anyone who would like to have a Playstation 5,” Ryan promised. Above all, they now want to supply the European markets with more consoles as quickly as possible.

Nevertheless, the market launch of the new game console should go down in the books of the group as the most successful product launch: “By the end of December, we have sold 4.5 million PS5 consoles,” says Ryan. This made the launch more successful than the Playstation 4 seven years ago. 25 Percent of new console buyers had not previously owned a previous console, 50 percent of them were new members of the so-called Playstation Network, the group’s paid online service.

These figures actually speak for the great success of the Sony console, even in pandemic times. After all, the devices with prices starting at 399 euros are a high-priced investment and opening up new buyers for the consoles is considered difficult in the gaming market due to its already wide fan base.