PlayStation VR is being sold for a ridiculously low price of $399- and I say low, because if you have seen the prices of other high end VR headsets on the market, you know $399 is pocket change by comparison.
But given that Sony is selling the headset at such a dramatically reduced price, you would expect them to either have compromised on the quality of the headset somewhere, or be taking a loss, if only a minor one, on the headset, right? But according to Sony’s Shuhei Yoshida, none of that is really true.
“According to our hardware team we are not going to lose money selling PlayStation VR for the price we announced,” Yoshida said to Eurogamer. “That’s great news because we can invest in promotion, doing trials, developer support without bleeding money by selling the PS VR hardware.”
Okay, no loss- but does that mean the quality had to be compromised on?
“In terms of how we accomplished it – luckily our hardware teams have been making hardware for a long time. We’ve approached PS VR development how we approach PlayStation console development – we always aim high in the quality of the experience. Especially because virtual reality is so new, we wanted to do it right first time. We waited until we could use cutting edge tech like 120Hz OLED displays – that doesn’t exist anywhere, we custom made it for PS VR.
“We also wanted to provide a social experience, like adding functionality on the processing unit to render two different screens – for the TV and for PS VR. That cost us money as well. So we focused on delivering the high quality experience first, and only after that we focused on how low a price we could deliver.”
After all of this, Sony was able to deliver on the price that they had wanted to.
“Our target was [that it would sell for] almost the same price as the PS4, which was $399/€399. We are very happy we could hit that.”
PlayStation VR launches in October, worldwide.