Despite high price, PlayStation VR2 still beat predecessor’s launch sales

Over 600,000 people falling into their TVs worldwide

Sony has released its latest financial earnings report, which shows that its newest Virtual Reality technology, PlayStation VR2 had a pretty impressive launch, garnering over 600,000 unit sales in its first six weeks of release.

While VR tech has been, and perhaps always will be, something of a niche market, this number eclipses the launch numbers of the original PlayStation VR hardware, which first launched back in the fall of 2016. Even more notably, the PSVR 2 unit has been lambasted for its staggeringly high price range, with the PS5-only unit retailing for around $550 USD, essentially the price of a disc-based PS5 itself.

But these numbers show that PSVR 2 has still seen a successful 8% increase over its predecessor, in part thanks to a litany of recognizable brands among its first run of software. VR games and experiences — either on the shelves now, or coming in the near future — include titles based on series such as Horizon, Resident Evil, Ghostbusters, Until Dawn, Tetris, and Gran Turismo. While undoubtedly expensive, PlayStation VR2 is highly impressive technology, with almost bewildering levels of immersion and a much slicker and more efficient cabling system.

Interestingly, however, the report fails to declare how many PSVR 2 units have been sold in total since the hardware’s release. Sony is quick to note the success for those six launch weeks, but remain quiet on sales for several months since. Initial reports from Bloomberg said that Sony had hoped to shift two million units in PSVR 2 launch year, but halved those expectations due to disappointing pre-orders. This is a report Sony was quick to deny. But it remains to be seen whether these impressive launch figures represent the lion’s share of all PSVR 2 sales, for this year and those years still to come.