With Sony Interactive Entertainment Europe’s Jim Ryan revealing yesterday that Sony will sell “many hundreds of thousands” of PlayStation VR headsets at launch, SIE America President Shawn Layden has told Polygon in a pre-launch interview that the company is making a profit on every PSVR unit sold.
Layden made the comment after declining to say if they were thinking of doing a PSVR upgrade in the future, similar to the PS4 and PS4 Pro. He added, “I’m still ten days away from getting the first generation out the door. This is a new frontier for all of us, Sony and its players. Anyone who says they can predict the future is not telling the truth. But people do feel like the time has come for bringing VR to the consumer level. This is the year it all begins.”
In terms of PlayStation VR games, there are 30 at launch, with 20 more planned to come out by the end of 2016. Because there’s such a wide variety of titles available on day one, Layden admits that no one knows what the killer app will be:
We’re trying to take the whole gaming experience, trying to imagine if you could immerse yourself and be inside the game what would be the best title. So right now our games are really right across the board. From Thumper to Headmaster to EVE to becoming the Batman, there are a lot of different things to see where the VR market goes.
No one knows what the killer app is going to be.
The lack of a clear killer app hasn’t hurt PlayStation VR sales though, as many retailers around the world are currently out of stock. As GameStop COO Tony Bartel told The Street, many of their stores will be sold out by the end of today:
We saw tremendous demand, and in fact right now many of our stores will be sold out of the first wave of Sony’s PlayStation VR by tonight. We are working with them to try and get more product.
Have you picked up PlayStation VR yet?
[Source: Polygon, The Street, Kotaku]
