This Rerez Talks was recorded in March 2016, were Shane’s predictions accurate? Let’s find out!
So Sony just made a big announcement saying that their PlayStation VR headset is going to come in at a cost at about $400 to $470 if you get it bundled with that PlayStation camera. And that price is American which means that those dudes are probably going to win the whole VR battle in the future because at that price they're coming in at about $100 to $200 to even $300 less compared to their competitors the HTC Vive and the Oculus Rift. This is pretty insane because that price is really, really low and I know it still sounds really expensive but let me break it down for you and then I think you'll agree with me that Sony is going to win this whole VR thing. Now the differences in hardware is a very interesting thing to me. See the HTC Vive is going to have these sensors that go up on your wall. You're going to have to clear out a big space in your room and it comes with two motion controllers. They're putting in a lot of effort into making this thing feel like a totally unique VR experience. Now the Oculus Rift and the PlayStation VR are more neck-and-neck. They kind of are designed about the same way but there's a very big difference when it comes to price. Now the HTC Vive and the Oculus Rift pretty much require the same kind of computer, a very expensive close to $1000 computer, just to be able to run games and utilize those headsets but see the PlayStation VR not only is it cheaper by itself but when it's bundled with a PlayStation 4 the price is sub $1000 USD. This means by the time you've bought one of these other computers just to run those things you could be buying a PlayStation 4 + PSVR bundle complete. And for consumers, well if you told somebody to go to the store and just buy one of these things well they’d probably buy the PlayStation 4 because it's that much easier. Everything comes in one box and that is super important for consumers. It's one of the most important things ever. But it's not the only thing that really puts the PlayStation VR ahead of the competition. The software. All developers are going to want to release games that can be sold on every platform so they will start by looking at the least intensive and cheapest system to run, the PSVR. Sure these games may be ported to use with other systems but they won’t necessarily use any of the unique features of those systems. Because at the end of the day it's a lot cheaper so they're going to make really basic games that run on the PlayStation VR and they're going to use that as basically the one system. It doesn't matter if you have a really expensive system if you're making games on it you have to make sure that people have access to that stuff and well most people that want to sell games to are probably going to look at the cheapest option, PlayStation VR. So really that's kind of how it's going to play out. The PlayStation VR is most likely going to win because it's the cheapest model to buy, the cheapest one to get in a bundle and developers are going to go to it because well it doesn't matter how many cool features everybody else has they just want that VR thing that just works. Heck even if the PlayStation VR comes out and it sucks it's still going to sell a lot and it's probably going to be the thing that all the developers choose. So they're going to win the war not because they made really expensive technology or made something better than anybody else. They're going to win simply because well they knew what consumers wanted.
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