Capcom’s Resident Evil 7 [Review: 9/10] might be the biggest game to support VR yet, and a significant chunk of people are opting to play it this way.
That is according to Capcom’s ResidentEvil.net (RE.net), a hub site that gathers player statistics not just for its latest release but the entire series. When you first boot up the game on PlayStation 4, you can opt-in to contributing your data to an online pool of statistics, keeping track of factors like total time spent playing and total distance traveled. It also follows how many people are playing the game with Sony’s PlayStation VR headset.
At the time of writing, 62,270 people are using the optional VR support, which is 9.59% percent of the 649,117 people that have opted-in to RE.net. Note that many of the overall players will be on Xbox One and PC, so we don’t know what percentage of people are playing with PS VR in the PS4 user base.
The page is being updated multiple times per day, so that number is likely to have changed by the time you look at it. Bare in mind that many players won’t have opted-in (I hadn’t until I saw it was tracking the number of VR players), so this number could be larger. PS VR is the only headset the game’s currently available on, though Sony’s exclusivity period lasts for 12 months, so we could see these numbers shoot up if the game comes to Oculus Rift and HTC Vive on PC next January.
This also suggests that at least this many PlayStation VR headsets have been sold since its launch in October 2016. Sony hasn’t shared any sales figures for the device thus far, and the real figure is likely to be much larger considering not everyone with a unit will have bought the game. At the same time, it’s possible that some of these VR users are playing with the same headset across different PlayStation accounts.
We absolutely think Resident Evil 7 is worth playing in VR. In our review, games editor David Jagneaux called it a “veritable modern classic” that “embraces virtual reality as a medium and proves that you don’t have to cut corners or make sacrifices to create a compelling VR experience.”
