Picture: Sony
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Meta Quest 2 brought the virtual reality industry out of its doldrums. Sony’s Shuhei Yoshida thanks Meta for his “great job”.
Shuhei Yoshida led Sony’s global game studios for ten years and was instrumental in the development of Playstation VR. Since the end of 2019, he has supported Sony’s independent studios on behalf of the company.
Yoshida was a guest at the GI Live 2022 gaming conference these days and was invited to speak there, where he also talked about Playstation VR 2. Yoshida expressed his excitement about Sony’s upcoming VR headset, the calling it “truly a next-gen experience”.
Meta does a great job according to Yoshida
According to Yoshida, the virtual reality market is still small and growing. In 2016, there would have been a lot of hype surrounding virtual reality when Sony and Oculus launched their first VR headsets. After that, the industry fell on hard times as investors lost interest and moved on to other things.
A big fan of virtual reality, Yoshida acknowledges Meta’s involvement. “Thanks to Meta: they are doing a great job of promoting the quest so that more people come and try VR for the first time,” Yoshida said.
Still, VR is a growing market and only a “subset” of the console business, he said.
PSVR 2: focus on indies?
Yoshida’s thanks are justified: in hindsight, Meta has almost single-handedly kept the consumer side of the industry alive by creating a profitable ecosystem for developers over the past two or three years. Surviving VR studios could play a critical role on Playstation VR 2, according to Yoshida.
“So there are big games like Horizon Call of the Mountain or Resident Evil Village. Yeah, they’re amazing, but it’s the indies in my mind that are really taking a risk because they want to make games in VR.
Hopefully that doesn’t mean Sony relies primarily on indie.
The Metaverse hype, Yoshida continues, has brought new momentum and investment to the industry. We will see great VR games from VR publishers who have learned a lot in the meantime and have new resources to implement their plans.
The thanks are mutual
It’s interesting to wonder what Sony’s VR strategy would have looked like if Meta Quest 2 hadn’t been such a resounding success. Would Sony have dared to make a second attempt with Playstation VR 2 or rather would have refrained from doing so, since VR studios would have turned away from the medium in the meantime? We will probably never know.
In any case, Meta will be relieved that Sony is back on top and also investing in virtual reality. Thanks should be reciprocated.
Below are Shuhei Yoshida’s translated statements in full.
“You may know that I was heavily involved in the development of the original PlayStation VR and had a role in promoting the system when it launched in 2016, so I’m a huge VR fan.
I don’t know if you’ve tried it, but when you try PSVR2 it’s truly a next generation experiencewhich we are super excited about.
But the virtual reality market is still small and growing. Thanks to Meta: they’re doing a great job of promoting Quest, so more people are coming to try VR for the first time. But still, compared to console gaming, it’s a subset and a growing market.
When the industry sees this opportunity in something really really exciting from a technical standpoint or from a gameplay standpoint, but the market is small, what happens is: it’s the indies, they’re waiting to creating VR games since the VR boom in the 1990s.
They were waiting for this technology, like Mizuguchi-san (developer of Rez Infinite & Tetris Effect), to be available to create games. So there are big games like Horizon Call of the Mountain or Resident Evil Village. Yeah, they’re amazing, but it’s the Indies in my mind that are really taking a risk because they want to make VR games.
There was a lot of hype around PSVR and Oculus when we launched around the same time in 2016, but after a few years investors moved on to something different, so there was a very difficult in 2017, 2018 and 2019.
But there are independent publishers and VR developers who have survived this difficult period, and they have released new games in VR, and they have developed this knowledge and this experience of how to use this new technology, and they make better and better games.
Now with the Metaverse the investments are coming back and some of them are now investing a lot of money and becoming publishers to help other developers as well. You’ll see great VR games coming out of these now reinvigorated, expanded, and reinvested VR publishers.
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