Five months on from launch and Capcom’s Resident Evil 7 is still the biggest game to come to Sony’s PlayStation VR (PSVR) thus far. Using an optional stat-tracking service, we know that quite a few people have tried the game with this VR support. In fact the sheer number of people playing in VR has been a surprise even to Sony itself.
Head of Sales and Marketing Jim Ryan revealed as much in an E3 interview with GamesIndustry.biz. Talking about the importance of emphasising Sony’s new headset at shows like last week’s, he revealed that the company was seeing big successes in unexpected places.
“We had no idea that VR would play such a significant part in the success of Resident Evil 7,” Ryan said. “The percentage of people who played that game on PS4, and then in VR, was in double digits. It wasn’t 10.1%, either. That was a big surprise to us.”
Ryan’s answer suggests that the number of people that played RE7 inside VR is even bigger than the 232,293 that are currently listed on Capcom’s ResidentEvil.net stat-tracking service. Players have to opt-in to this service for their stats to be attributed, so it’s likely there’s a good deal more VR players that haven’t opted in. At the end of April it was revealed the game had sold 3.5 million units.
We’re happy to see VR become a hit for RE7; it’s one of our favorite games on any headset right now. We gave it 9/10 in our review. “By uniting elements from the past, such as the slow pacing, focus on exploration, mind-bending puzzles, and desperation for survival, with the pulse-pounding first-person gameplay of the recent era of horror games, Capcom has crafted a veritable modern classic,” Games Editor David Jagneaux said. “Resident Evil 7 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.”
