PSVR2’s best feature might be Sony’s checkbook

As someone continually distracted by the promise of VR, I was pretty excited by Sony’s PlayStation VR2 announcements last night. These specs are great. It’s nice to see a pair of first-party studios making a VR game. Although having a cord can be annoying at times, it isn’t as bad as last time when Sony representatives tried to conceal the wires during photo shoots.

As I thought about the news, though, I realized I’m less excited about PSVR2 as a piece of new technology than I am about it as a business justification to get Sony and others to fund new VR games.

The technology was amazing when the PlayStation VR first came out, but the real reason it worked were the deals Sony made to acquire games such as Resident Evil 7And Rez Infinitethe headset and the support Sony provided for games such as Astro Bot: Rescue Mission. There could have been more support, as always, and I wasn’t wild about all the big brand spin-off games and modes, like floating awkwardly around a Tekken fight. We did get a lot of VR experimentation out of this.

VR is kinda in pain right now, and the market for VR has yet another wave. After Alyx: Half-Life shipped almost two years ago, we haven’t seen a lot of standout releases.

It was only natural, as a large game sucking out all oxygen in the room makes every other thing look less impressive. Iron Man VR, Star Wars: Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge, Medal of Honor: Beyond and Beyond, Demeo, Songs in the Smoke, Lone Echo II, and others, so it’s not like the market is dead. But when a port of a 16-year-old game is winning VR game of the year awards (while the latest mainline game in that series dropped VR), and a port of a 17-year-old game is the biggest new announcement we’ve heard in a couple years, the lineup feels a little flat.

I don’t know what sort of push Sony will be giving PSVR2 just yet, so I don’t want to jump to conclusions. Sony is in a very different place now than it was when PSVR launched in 2016, and these things don’t tend to happen in a vacuum — Sony’s first VR push coincided with less non-VR indie support, so the money has to come from somewhere.

Seeing Horizon Call of the MountainThis feels like an excellent first step. Even though the title of this game needs to include a colon, it is a good first step.