Game developers will decide the fortunes of PSVR2. What do they make of Sony’s sophomore effort?

By Alex Spencer

Almost seven years on from PSVR’s release, as Sony prepares to launch its follow-up, it’s worth considering how far VR gaming has come in that time. In some ways, it’s a very different landscape from the one we faced in 2016. True, Facebook-owned Oculus VR is still the market leader – except that now it’s Meta-owned Reality Labs, and the success of Quest 2 has led it away from chasing bleeding-edge fidelity in favour of a cheaper, lighter and, vitally, untethered approach. Having made its first forays into VR that same year in partnership with HTC, Valve has since struck out on its own with Index, and made what is perhaps the medium’s one truly essential title, Half-Life: Alyx.

In a more fundamental sense, though, things haven’t changed much at all. Quest 2 has sold an estimated 15 million units, and Meta bragged in October that $1.5 billion has been spent on its Quest Store since it opened in 2019 – but look at that latter figure again in the context of games on console, PC or mobile. It’s as much money as EA makes from FIFA sales alone in the space of a year, without counting in-game spending in Ultimate Team. Back-of-then-apkin maths suggests that the average Quest owner has spent an average of around $100 on software in total – in the space of three years. This underlines the fact that, hardware adoption aside, VR still isn’t part of our regular diet. And accordingly, the conversation seems stuck on the same old questions. Will VR’s moment ever come? Could this be it at last?

That in turn puts a peculiar weight on any major developments in the VR space. Carrying on its back the future of an entire medium, each new launch doesn’t just need to be good – the kind of iterative step forward we now expect from a fresh console generation or the latest instalment of a triple-A series – it needs to change the status quo. Quest 2 did. Half-Life: Alyx did. Initial impressions suggest, however, that PSVR2 really has its work cut out in this regard.

It is, however, a considerable step forward from Sony’s previous effort. Now with 4K OLED HDR displays for each eye (compared to 1080i in the original) and leveraging the processing power of PS5, it can easily hold its own against top-end PC VR hardware. It also incorporates Tobii’s eye-tracking tech, which can be used for everything from foveated rendering – allowing the device to focus its computing power on the places you’re actually looking – to direct gameplay applications, more on which later. It’s also the first consumer headset to incorporate head-mounted haptics, applying a little rumble when a game calls for it.

The secret weapon of any VR solution, though, is surely motion control, removing the layer of abstraction of a traditional controller to allow for more directly hands-on interactions. PSVR was something of an exception to this rule, repurposing PS3’s bulky Move wands, which PSVR2 replaces with the bespoke Sense controllers. These offer a full suite of buttons and sticks in a layout that is essentially a DualSense split in two, as well as all of that controller’s haptics and adaptive-trigger functionality. Atop that it adds finger tracking – something we haven’t yet tested extensively, but which seems to do a good job keeping up with the wiggling of our digits in our limited sampling.

Sony has also addressed PSVR’s setup issues: the original device required a breakout box and four separate cables, but all that has been reduced to a single USB-C cable here. There’s no need for an external camera, either, since it uses cameras built into the headset for more accurate inside-out tracking. Developers tell us the setup process is seamless, and that its scanning of your environs to set boundaries “feels like magic”.

But it’s hard to shake the sense of the familiar. The headset itself looks and feels similar to its predecessor, which is a positive, given the strength of the original design. It isn’t noticeably lighter, and we don’t have any of the difficulties finding the focal sweet spot experienced with PSVR, although others have reported problems with PSVR2’s Fresnel lenses. The Sense controllers feel good in the hands, but haptics aside – which, in fairness, might make more of a difference here than on console – they’re largely a case of bringing the hardware in line with competitors. It all adds up to what feels like a solid approach, if not perhaps something you can imagine converting a VR sceptic at this point.