The good news about PlayStation VR? The $400 price tag is much lower than both the Rift and Vive. The bad? It’s not releasing for another seven months, and fans want to know why.
Sony confirmed both the price and delay of PlayStation VR at its GDC event last week. The price was met with universal praise, so what made the company choose to push the launch window from the first half of 2016 to October?
“We had an internal target that we realized was a bit too small,” Shuhei Yoshida, Sony Computer Entertainment’s Head of Worldwide Studios, recently told Kinda Funny Games about Sony’s readiness to meet demand. “That was the reason we pushed back the launch…”
Check out the comments at 18 minutes and 55 seconds into the video above. According to Yoshida, it was Sony’s business side that soon realized the positive buzz surrounding PlayStation VR would likely mean the company couldn’t meet demand for its initial launch date. In fact, his words seem to ring true in yesterday’s launch of a pre-order campaign for a bundle for PlayStation VR, which sold out at various retailers within minutes of going online in the United States. Another chance to pre-order the unit itself will go live at 7 am PT on March 29.
Ultimately it doesn’t seem like the delay will make much of a dent to PlayStation VR’s chances. The far more influential factor here has always been price and we now know that the company has both Oculus VR and HTC beat in this respect. If anything, the delayed launch gives Sony the chance to come out swinging at both E3 and Gamescom in the next few months with impressive content line-ups, cherry picking from the list of 230 studios working on the kit. The company may have the hot product for Christmas 2016, and now’s the time to prove it.
