PS VR2 will be one of the shining stars at tonight's 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:PlayStation State of Play. It's 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Sony's latest weapon in an arsenal designed to keep it winning the battles across the console war, but it's not without its drawbacks. At a $550 price point, it's more expensive than a PS5 itself that’s needed to run it, and its big killer app - 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Horizon Call of the Mountain - has received 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:lukewarm reviews. My own take is that it's decent, but not worth buying a whole new console for. Much of the conversation has been on the range of games PS VR2 has, as well as 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:the amount which are already availablꩲe elsewh𝓡ere. This is a sticking po🌜int for the PS VR2 - it has both too many and too few exclusives. So where does it go from here?
The platform has around 80 games that either released yesterday at launch or are scheduled for the next month or so as part of the launch window. That's an impressive number, especially for those who are diving into virtual reality for the first time. Given PlayStation's mass appeal in the casual market over the more hardcore reach of PC-based headsets, a large chunk of the playerbase here will be new to VR and therefore will never have played any of these games before. Add in exclusives like Call of the Mountain and The Dark Pictures: Switchback, and it's a mightily impressive line-up.
You can't ignore that PS VR2 will be a gateway, and will seek to position itself as such, but you also can't ignore the fact that it is not the only headset on the market. Of these 80 launch window games, Fantavision 202X is the only one alongside Horizon and Switchback coming as a bona fide exclusive. You also have 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Gran Turismo 7 and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Resident Evil Village, which are coming to PS VR2 but are just꧙ VR versions of their base games, the latter of which is not an exclusive. Most interesting is Before Your Eyes - the charmingly touching indi🦩e that is played with your eyes will be exclusive to PS VR2 for its VR version, but the standard version is available far and wide, and is even part of the Netflix games line up.
Setting aside potential caveats to lower that number, you're left with six. In some ways, that's not a great haul. The headset bears the cost of a whole new console, and only bringing six exclusives with it has left it open to criticism. But then, as has been discussed many times by anyone who has even smelled a VR headset, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:the medium is prohibitively expensive. There are obvious drawbacks to VR (total immersion is not as big a selling point as it seems in a world where players scroll on their phones or listen to podcasts while playing, it requires a lot more space, gaming is not typically an active hobby...), but the main barrier is people just can't afford it.
Not only can they not afford the standalone price, there's also the expense of games and the relatively limited library. If you invest in a gaming PC, you can get every game that comes to PC, and can also emulate pretty much any old ones you can think of. If you buy a VR headset, you need to hope the games come to your headset and are compatible or run well even when it does.
Maybe PlayStation's approach is best then. It's a wide library and if you play a neat game, chances are you can recommend it to your friend with a different headset and they can play too. Horizon is the PS VR2's big selling point so maybe it gets a pass on that, and GT7 is just a free update to a game that's already locked on PlayStation anyway. Meanwhile, Fantavision 202X is a sequel to a PS2 launch title, so the exclusivity feels grandfathered in there. That leaves three exclusives that I would consider to be 'unfair' - and what I mean by that is VR needs to be widely adopted in order to grow, and splitting up different games to different specific headsets makes this wholescale adoption less likely.
PlayStation has been maligned for its lack of exclusives, and from a commercial observation standpoint, it is only fair to highlight. But VR as a medium has too many exclusives that hinder its progress, so perhaps it’s worth lauding Sony for this approach. Maybe it's not deliberate, and in the next few years we'll see God of War, The Last of Us, Ghost of Tsushima, or Bloodborne get their own Call of the Mountain. I mean, probably not that last one, but still.
I could be eating my words if Sony is just taking a slow run up, but as a market leader with a firm grasp on casual consumers, it should be applauded for offering a crowd-pleasing experience over competing for the hardcore crowd with niche exclusives that further muddy the tranquil waters of VR. People are saying PS VR2 doesn't have enough exclusives, but from where I'm standing, it already has a few too many.