A big sale on PSVR 2 pushed the headset’s holiday sales volume on Amazon US higher than might have been expected, selling nearly five times more than last year.

PSVR 2’s Black Friday and holiday sale brought a huge 42% discount on the Horizon bundle of the headset, dropping the US price from $550 to $350.

Predictably, the sale increased the sales volume of the headset, but by even more than one might have expected. PSVR 2 saw nearly five times the peak sales volume on Amazon US during the 2024 holiday season as it did in 2023.

Granted, it’s important to note that the headset didn’t get any particularly big sales in the 2023 holiday season. But still, one might be inclined to think that if you cut the price of something by 50%, then you would expect to sell 50% more than you would have otherwise. In this case, we can see that PSVR 2 has a far different relationship between price and sales.

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Sony Shares PSVR 2's Most Downloaded Games of 2024

In 2024, Sony started the sale ahead of Black Friday and kept it running well into the new year. The sale lasted so long that it seems the company may have been trying to sell off stock, perhaps because it has a new SKU on the way (like a new bundle or lower cost redesign). While some have suggested that Sony could be losing faith in the headset and trying to do a firesale before discontinuing it, we think it’s likely the company continues to offer the headset at least until its next console cycle, even if it doesn’t put much weight behind it in the meantime.

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Ben Lang
Ben is the world's most senior professional analyst solely dedicated to the XR industry, having founded Road to VR in 2011—a year before the Oculus Kickstarter sparked a resurgence that led to the modern XR landscape. He has authored more than 3,000 articles chronicling the evolution of the XR industry over more than a decade. With that unique perspective, Ben has been consistently recognized as one of the most influential voices in XR, giving keynotes and joining panel and podcast discussions at key industry events. He is a self-described "journalist and analyst, not evangelist."
  • Azurewrath

    I do hope they announce a permanent price cut for PSVR2, it deserves these sales numbers (and higher obviously). Great hardware but crickets software wise. I don't even mind that as long as continued great 3rd party support keeps coming.

    • blahblahblahblah

      I know a few indie devs who wanted to port to PSVR2 but Sony requires you to have a static IP address, the submission process takes months and then you have to pay $2k for a Unity Pro license.

      • Azurewrath

        Dang, it's always bad to hear that, indie devs are the lifeline of VR right now so the more the merrier. I do hope both parties makes things easier since VR2 game sales are pretty strong in terms of attach rate.

      • VrBiTcH

        They hate individual devs. They require you to be a corp. Typical hive-mind culture!

  • guest

    Conspicuously absent in this article is any mention of the ability now to use Sony’s Official PSVR 2 Adapter for PC VR.

    • Rayza

      That will account for an absolutely tiny amount of sales, it doesn't even support most of it's best features on PC.

      • MadHenGSH

        I'm not so sure about that..lots of ppl just want a cheap replacement for the Reverb G2 that bricked by microshit, even tho there is no HDR and eye tracking.

      • hiro

        I bought it for PCVR on sale. The features that are missing are also missing on most other PCVR-headsets, and I wouldn't call them best features. Best feature for me is OLED, even with mura. HDR is not available, but Sony designed it for HDR, so it is very bright – a big plus also on PC. Dynamic foveated rendering is missing, but PCs that can handle VR have capable GPUs anyway. 120Hz is a good feature – I can run performance heavy games with it and motion smoothing set to "always" (so only 60 FPS need to be rendered). I wouldn't underestimate those sales because of PCVR capability.

        • Christian Schildwaechter

          Sony could still enable HDR support on PC. It is still somewhat unclear how exactly the PSVR2 video signal is transferred. The bandwidths of DisplayPort 1.3 send over USB-C is pretty much exactly what is needed for a HMD with 2*2000*2040@120Hz in 24bit RGB. Going for 30bit HDR already puts you over budget, so this requires enabling DSC, a barely noticeable, latency free signal compression introduced in DP 1.4. If this is what they use, all they have to do is allow using DP 1.4 on PC too. DP 1.4 was introduced in 2016, so pretty much all GPUs offer it.

          But according to iVRy, PSVR2 only uses half of the data lines and therefore half of the bandwidth of USB-C anyway, so there is enough capacity left to also send back camera data etc. In which case DSC would always be needed, so there would be no technical reason why HDR isn't already working on PC, it would be a deliberate design limitation on PC.

      • Peter vasseur

        What’s games support the features it has built in?

  • 石雨濛

    Sony is in the business of making money – so they cannot afford to cut prices for too long unlike Meta.

    Meta is in the buises of reprogramming society and surveillance. Meta lost 6 billion in the past Quarter – where does Meta get billions to lose every month?

    • Rayza

      Is that an actual question? Obviously from advertising on their huge social media platforms.

      • 石雨濛

        It is an actual question. Could the funding possibly be coming from the USA Government, Israel, CIA, FBI, Five-Eyes etc?

        • VrBiTcH

          More likely the opposite, that is, organized crime. From their social media perhaps they can tell when and where to find and not find people?

  • eadVrim

    On PC it is a high immersive headset with a shi*y tracking

    • Peter vasseur

      I don’t have any issues with tracking

      • eadVrim

        Maybe your environment help, are there any reflected materials even with a low light reflection? How is the volume of your room big/small, are there different objects in your room? Thx

  • Sven Viking

    Quite impressive considering how much Sony has been pushing it (not much).

  • Christian Schildwaechter

    Let's hope this was only the first step towards Sony now properly supporting PSVR2, ideally on both PS5 and PC.

    The concept behind PSVR2 is clever, the main idea to build a headset optimized for running flat AAA titles in VR too. Achieved by a rather low resolution for a 2023 desktop HMD that might not see a successor for 6+ years, somewhere between Quest 2 and 3, with 60Hz to 120Hz reprojection and efficient ETFR that can reduce the render time by up to 72%.

    This approach still requires AAA studios to buy into PSVR2 and add VR modes to their games at much lower risk/cost than creating VR-only titles. They'd probably still not make a lot of money from it, but might be willing to give it a try as long as Sony convinced them that VR has a growing future on PlayStation.

    It's nice that Sony is now willing to sell PSVR2 at reasonable prices, with the ~5x sales volume compared to 2023 showing that given the right conditions, PS5 gamers are interested in VR. It's also great that smaller VR developers now see their games selling successfully on PSVR2. But the real challenge is still for Sony to convince AAAs to design and release hybrid games by demonstrating their longterm support for the platform, something they did a pretty horrible job at before summer 2024.

    Changing that image will require more than the occasional attractive PSVR2 bundle. A permanent price cut should be the next step, and (some of) Sony's own upcoming AAA releases getting VR support would send an ever stronger message.

    • Herbert Werters

      Absolutely. Two hybrid titles, “Dreams of Another” and “The Midnight Walk”, were presented at the last State of Play. I really hope this is not a coincidence but a strategy from Sony. That's exactly what I've been wanting since the Rift CV1 with its XBOX gamepad.

      • Azurewrath

        FNAF the Secret of the Mimic is another hybrid title shown yesterday, although the store quietly removed all PSVR2 mentions… hmm. It was shown as a PSVR2 demo in PAX last year, maybe scrapped? I hope not.

        • Herbert Werters

          That's absolutely right. What's going on there?

      • namekuseijin

        you gotta be joking if you think an indie looking like a PS1 reject and another looking like stop-motion will do anything to move psvr 2

        the only thing that would move psvr 2 would be hybrids for big AAA games, like TLOU, Uncharted, Spiderman, God of War, Destiny 2, Killzone etc etc etc

        they want to gatekeep it, to keep it small, wasted in the hands of indies…

        • Herbert Werters

          Oh come on, that’s nonsense. Which AAA games would the PS5 be able to play if a 4090 with the UEVR can’t get the frames for some AAA games? It’s possible, but you have to do a lot for it. They all have to make sure that the costs are recouped. But I’m in favor of it, let them do it as quickly as possible.

          • Christian Schildwaechter

            TL;DR: hybrid AAA is what PSVR2 was designed for, and it's feasible due to an extremely well balanced approach, esp. when compared to PCVR UEVR still mostly relying on brute rendering force, requiring way faster hardware.

            It's not nonsense, it's what Sony's hybrid game strategy is really all about: running PS5 AAA games that target flat 4K@60Hz also on PSVR2 with 98% the pixel count of UHD 4K reprojected from 60Hz to 120Hz. Using the same RX 6700/RTX 2070 Super class GPU, even if the same game on PC would require an RTX 4070/4080 with UEVR, and often even more.

            PSVR2 games have to render roughly as many raw pixels as flat games, but need added performance for extra geometry visible with the much larger FoV rendered for two views. Which is where Sony's aggressive foveated rendering comes in, reducing the load to ~1/4th with ETFR. Even their FFR saves 60% compared to only 26%-36% on Quest, with the (improved) Fresnel's and high FoV hiding artifacts in the periphery. There will more optimizations to reach the design goal of running PS5 games with similar performance requirements on both flat and PSVR2.

            Extra work will still be needed for hybrid games, but way less than for example for 2017 Fallout 4 that was only possible due to FO4 already supporting lower quality graphics modes, high end GPUs and lots of tuning, compromises and expensive optimizations. Compared to flat 1080p@60Hz, on Rift CV1/HTC it had to render 25% more pixels, 50% more frames, almost doubling performance requirements there. And it released before desktop GPUs were even capable of VRS/variable rate shading required for both FFR and ETFR. With PS5 having roughly flat and VR rendered pixel parity, plus saving 72% with ETFR, it offers a (theoretical) ~8x performance benefit. Today PCVR still relies mostly on faster GPUs, with even FFR only possible in DX11 through Nvidia patches not working everywhere, and ETFR available on a few HMDs like the Pimax Crystal with 2x the PSVR2 resolution and only saving ~40%.

            So technically AAA on PSVR2 isn't nonsense, instead the reason why Sony even went through all this trouble to reduce the required extra effort/optimization to where AAA studios might consider adding VR modes. With fixed hardware this was pretty much the only realistic option to get VR content that could draw in a lot of users, while UEVR users can always throw more money at the problem. Dreams of Another, The Midnight Walk or FNAF will help to establish hybrid game design, but the strategy will only be a success if we also see TLOU, Uncharted, Spiderman or God of War class hybrids to reach beyond a small number of enthusiasts. Not every game will work well both flat and in VR without requiring a major redesign, so from this list, probably only a Spiderman game could see VR support. It's not an accident we got exploration heavy RE8 and GT7 benefitting a lot from head turning first, as sort of hybrid best-case scenarios.

        • Peter vasseur

          Well clearly you don’t have much experience with vr. If all your about is gta6 games then of course. To anyone with a clue dreams of another is going to be very cool. So is midnight walk. There is not Lot like it out there in vr. But yeah it’s not the super game everyone buys for flat gaming.

          • namekuseijin

            show them to your flat playstation pals and watch them laugh at you…

          • Peter vasseur

            I don’t have any flat PlayStation pals I’ve move beyond the primitive level of gaming. Been there done that.

  • Leisure Suit Barry

    Just further proof Sony made the PSVR2 DOA with the launch price

    Estimates are now at 2.5M sold after 2 years, which is worse than PSVR1