PlayStation VR nears 1m sold
Sony increasing production to meet demand.
PlayStation VR sold 915,000 units worldwide as of 19th February 2017, Sony has announced.
The better than expected sales figure comes despite unit shortages across the UK following the launch of the device in October 2016.
Sony said today it is increasing production to meet demand, and will continue to support developers who make games for PSVR.
2016 was the year virtual reality headsets finally came out from the likes of Oculus, HTC / Valve and Sony. We don't have official sales figures for the Rift nor the HTC Vive, but back in January 2017, Epic Games founder Tim Sweeney told Glixel that out of the approximately half a million PC VR headsets sold to date, HTC Vive had outsold Oculus two-to-one.
Before that, back in December 2016, DayZ creator Dean Hall, who has made a VR game called Out of Ammo, spoke out about "the hard truth" of VR development, saying the project was "very unprofitable" despite exceeding sales expectations and "selling unusually well compared to many other VR games".
"There is no money in it," Hall said of VR. "I don't mean 'money to go buy a Ferrari', I mean 'money to make payroll'. People talk about developers who have taken Oculus/Facebook/Intel money like they've sold out and gone off to buy an island somewhere. The reality is these developers made these deals because it is the only way their games could come out."
It seemed a bit doom and gloom for VR, then, in its tough first year. But for Sony, which is sitting pretty on an incredible 53.4m PS4 units sold, a pleasant surprise.
Could PSVR be a viable platform for publishers and developers? According to Sony, there are more than 100 PSVR "software titles and experiences" globally as of 19th February, and the number of developers and publishers has increased to more than 360.
Currently there are more than 220 software titles in development for PSVR, Sony added, mentioning Ace Combat 7, Final Fantasy 15, Steel Combat, Tekken 7, Farpoint and Gran Turismo Sport. It said by the end of 2017, over 100 new software titles and experiences are expected to be released.