One of the biggest questions most consumers have about any product is whether or not the manufacturer is going to back it for the long haul.
Nobody wants to buy some faddish, expensive thing that no one ever looks at again six months after launch.
And while a lot of people initially wrote off the PlayStation VR as just a fad, it has endured to become one of the pillars of the VR segment.
Sony noticed that and have continuously reaffirmed their commitment to VR gaming in the future.
But they’ve never been that specific as to how much support they were going to offer and what kind of roadmap the company had for VR.
Sure, they’ve said it will be part of next-gen hardware but the when and what are still pretty vague.
Now the company is giving us what we all wanted: Some kind of concrete information about their plans for the future of the PSVR brand.
Needless to say, the journey will be a long one because Sony is talking terms of a decade, not years down the road.
So what will we see from PSVR ten years from now?
In an interview with Game Informer, Shawn Layden discussed how virtual reality will evolve over the next decade and how the PSVR platform will similarly change to accommodate these new trends. These trends include augmented reality, live-streaming media, eSports, and other applications that aren’t purely video games.
To give us some idea of what he sees as the future of virtual reality technology development, he compared the segment to the smartphone’s growth rate. When you look at the first smartphones available compared to what we have now, the leap in capability is enormous. This will probably prove true for VR as well.
While the PSVR outsells its headset competitors, it isn’t anything like the main console which posts huge revenue numbers for Sony. That doesn’t mean that PSVR won’t become a significant stream of revenue for the PS brand in the future, however.
“We’ve gone from being the third cousin in entertainment to being one of the three bright stars…Arguably, depending on how you do the math, the largest one from impact on a financial basis,” Layden told Game Informer.
Another aspect that Layden points out is that VR is still very much in the beginning stages of its development. Although the idea for VR has existed for some time, serious consumer application of the tech has never really hit critical mass until now. Partially due to a lack in affordable technology to do VR properly and also partially because of an initial lack of developer response, virtual reality has shown it is more than a fad and has great potential for many areas of entertainment and beyond.
If Sony’s plans to harvest these gains early with a first mover advantage bear out, the company could look very smart for pushing the PlayStation VR headset. Yet, as with everything, only time will tell for sure.
