VR Gaming : That Macy’s feeling
In which shopping for cheap PSVR2 games gives me some weird 2001 Macy’s flashbacks
Let me confess something to you that I rarely like to admit to myself. I can’t stop window shopping on digital game stores. It’s crazy because IRL, I absolutely despise trawling around shops and malls, looking at long racks of clothes I’d rarely wear, tech I can’t afford, and gadgets I don’t need.
This wasn’t always the case; a long galaxy ago in a time far, far away, I would happily accompany my wife on any shopping trip. Love addles your brain. And when our son was small, young and excited by the world (instead of now being big, hairy and wondering how to find his place in it) I used to very much look forwards to long Saturdays out in the city as a family, having a wander here and a nibble there and watching our boy make discovery after discovery. Brilliant stuff.
The thing that changed wasn’t me, it was the economy. I soon realised the easiest way not to spend money on stuff I can’t afford and don’t need is to just avoid going shopping as much as possible. When I do go, I’ve gradually come to resent the relentless assault of consumer temptations. Rather than seeing a web of possibilities of all the ways my mood could improve if I bought this shirt or how happy it would make me to own that new 4K Boxset, now all I see is a minefield of possible ways I would later regret the decision and chastise myself for not being responsible enough with our finances. Turns out that luxury shopping actually is a luxury - it’s only fun for those who are rich, or those who can ignore that they’re poor.
Back in the days when disposable income wasn’t such a clear metaphor for throwing your money away, I visited New York with my wife. It was 2001, we flew over from the UK. Long flight, our arms got very tired. Glad we went, lots of interesting moments, but I didn’t love it, if I’m honest. We were vacationing there about a month before the 9/11 attack happened. I remember this distinctly because we took a great photo looking up between the towers as a jumbo flew overhead, framed perfectly between them. I thought that was going to be the best shot I took all holiday. But perhaps unsurprisingly all of our photos of the towers were missing and the negatives for them gone when we received the prints back from the developers (kids, ask your parents), and I probably ended up on a government watchlist somewhere. But this weekend just gone, I happened upon some of the photos we did get back which were of the outside of Macy’s on Herald Square. Macy’s was on our agenda, and a sight to behold for two well-travelled shoppers like us.
We wandered excitedly into the famous department store expecting it to be the grandest shopping experience we’d encountered since Galeries Lafayette in Paris, only to find the place was … well … a bit crap. What we saw was just crowded and confusing inside. Rather than open spaces with neatly curated displays and carefully composed showpieces, all we noticed was stock piled up messily on the floors and counters all over, price tags and labels missing, stock trolleys left empty around the spaces. Floor tiles that needed a sweep, chipped counter tops, and decor that felt 20 years out of fashion. The product boxes on the shelves were often tatty and had been opened and rifled through.
I’m willing to believe we walked into the wrong door from the street and managed to bypass the grandeur, and maybe they were in the middle of a reorg or a stock check or something. Regardless, it was a shock to get such a disappointing, discount-store first impression from this famous and lauded institution. I think this was day two of our stay, so the staff had seemed unduly abrupt and unhelpful too, and seemed to be perpetually annoyed, which definitely added to the overall negative vibe. After another week in town we’d come to realise that this wasn’t any special case of them being rude, just the famous New York ‘tude in action. That river of negativity coursing beneath the streets of Manhattan in Ghostbusters II? Totally plausible if you ask me.
And because we as humans somehow manage to Winzip all of these things together into the same compressed file our long term memories, every time I think of NY now, whatever I see in my minds eye is accompanied by the evocative aroma of hot summer garbage bags lining every street, which I guess was just the price of visiting in the summer. Great Museums, though. Amazing Pride parade. And we loved Virgil’s BBQ so much that my wife strategically engineered a holiday with her mates five years later that went Vegas, LA and then a quick pop over to New York ‘while we’re in the area(!)’ just so she could come home with a dozen or so bottles of their various BBQ sauces stuffed in her suitcase.
Aaaanyway. Jump forward 24 years to this last weekend. I had a Macy’s moment when I bought a couple of VR Games for PSVR2. (This was coincidentally the same day I found those Macy’s photos – hence why these dots unsurprisingly became connected in my mind).
These 2 games were ones I had been following. Now they had risen to the top of my huge PSN wishlist, which I sort via lowest price or discount, and which I religiously check every week. It’s a good system for me, with several benefits; It gives me good visibility of how often PSVR2 titles go on sale and by how much they’ve been discounted (endlessly useful in my daytime consultancy work). It means new I can see from my home screen when the new batch of discounts have been applied because my featured wishlist item will change. But most importantly, it means I can avoid the pain of trawling through the increasingly crappy PS Store on my PS5.
When I lost interest in going real-world shopping, my addiction shifted to digital storefronts, because it’s way easier to have a nosey but not spend money. Sometimes. Over the years I’ve cured myself of Etsy, Amazon and Ebay, but I can’t pass by the PSN store, Epic or Steam without having a “quick check to see what’s going cheap”. I do this regularly, partly out of professional curiosity, and partly because I just can’t escape the brainwashing effects that a lifetime of capitalist indoctrination have had on me. Nurture overwriting nature. Social conditioning. Also, my dear Mum was an absolute shopaholic until the end, so it’s probably hereditary. Look, it’s not my fault, so wipe that judgey-look off your face.
So I feel I have a fairly experienced vantage point over this particular commercial landscape, and I can declare with confidence that these stores have all gone to shit in recent times. Apart from Steam.
While it isn’t perfect, Steam is a million leagues ahead of other stores. Steam is the videogame version of the Macy’s my wife and I expected we would be visiting; grand, vibrant, offering everything under the sun, and delivering it in a polished, highly efficient and professional manner, with lots of reasons and attractions to make you want to shop there regularly.
The current PSN store, the Meta store, Nintendo’s e-Shop and the EPIC store are all more like the actual Macy’s experienced we had. Prestigious from the outside, maybe, but once you’re through the door things disappoint. These stores all have problems, both functionally and experientially. I’m not going to break them down or draw a comparison chart but the key takeaways are that they’re badly organised, packed with too much crap nobody would want to buy, showcasing seemingly random low-value offerings ahead of big ticket items, offering the most spartan approach to customer convenience and shopping experience that they can get away with, affording the user little in the way of meaningful curation of their purchases. Generally, these stores give off that general 2020’s stank that we’re all becoming very familiar with. The one that says they don’t want to understand or really care about making the user happy because they’re the only show in town and they don’t really need to try and harder.
You’d think that these sites, where gaming platforms pull in most of their retail revenue, would be tuned to perfection these days; completely focused around making an amazing impression on the customer, building brand trust and using all sorts of tricks and tactics to make us want to visit again soon. And yet this isn’t the case at all.
While Steam has lots of problems of it’s own, it’s really smart in understanding that, once a customer has bought a game, there’s reasons for them to stick around.
When I browse a game on Steam, there are lots of tools to flag it for future interest, let the developer know I’m interested, sign up for news about it, add it and order it on my wishlist, find similar games, read what other users are thinking about it, and catch up on the developers blogs and progress videos - all a click or two away from the game listing. And when I buy a game on Steam, I’m provided with a fully customizable library to order however I like (alphabetical, purchase date, steam reviews, Metacritic reviews, most recently played, favourites, most played etc) together with the ability to tag and flag games and create dynamic collections (so I can see all my Star Wars games in one folder, and also have the subset of those where you’re flying various pew-pew spaceships appear in my ‘Pew-Pew’ folder too). I have all my unplayed games on my homescreen (listed by descending Steam review scores, and currently numbering (yeesh) 152 titles ‘To Play’). I can add games I’ve bought from other stores to this library and launch them straight from Steam. I can even change the library art, box art and logo to whatever I want. Which is how I have this gorgeous set of matching custom covers for my Star Wars games, for instance.
The purchase also gets me little extras. Points to spend on avatars, profile backgrounds, emojis, customizations and so on. And games come with not just the standard Achievements / Trophies, but often also include tradeable collectible cards, and collecting a full set means you can trade it in for a badge to show your love for that game on your profile. And then you can keep levelling that badge up if you’re keen to be the biggest uber-nerd. And there’s loads more benefits - free mods through the workshop for all the top games, hints and guides, playthroughs, developer interviews. What all this means is that I feel engaged with my collection and the games I buy on Steam. It’s more of a giant games room than just a game shelf. I get to tailor and curate and personalise my experience. It enables me to play games with the games I play; ordering them on my shelves, arranging and showcasing my favourites, and engaging with other users and their thoughts. And if I want to see how a game has been selling, or it’s previous sale prices, that’s all possible. If you’re into a game, either truly madly deeply, or just with peripheral interest, Steam caters to your interest in every way. The 30% ‘Steam Tax’ (their sales cut) may seem like it’s behind the times from a developers point of view, but the platform manifests an invested and informed audience, and gives every developer and game a deeply useful and versatile basecamp on the platform.
Epic on the other hand just lets you make some folders and put games in them. Sure, they give away free games all the time, which is a draw - and which helps fill out my Steam library! - but the experience is otherwise spartan and abrasive. Simple things like taking you all the way back to the 1st page of the shop whenever you come out of a game’s page are just maddening. Just as annoying is a forced refresh to the library that happens about once a minute, momentarily wiping the screen and resetting whatever action you were in the middle of doing before it hit. It boggles my mind how much Epic spend on user acquisition through the free games and generous bonus vouchers in sales, and how little effort they have spent on actually making the experience of using the gaming service accommodating or pleasant at even a basic level. There are plenty of Steam fans out there who will happily pay for a game on Steam rather than pick a free/cheaper copy on Epic just because they hate the launcher so much, and while you can import those games to your Steam library as I mentioned earlier, the price is that you miss out on all of the other stuff if you don’t buy from Steam. If that doesn’t demonstrate the underlying value of this whole player-centric, loyalty-rewarding ecosytem that Steam have built around buying a game, I don’t know what could. Epic just don’t seem to get this at all - or else they know they just couldn’t compete with Steam and don’t bother trying. And importantly for my interests, Epic just don’t focus on VR in any way in the store, and offer very few VR titles for sale.
The Meta store is a whole other kettle of dogshit. It’s been getting slowly better over the last few months, but it’s still pretty crap in many unique and special ways, far too many to get into here. Maybe another time if I’m feeling mean. But the key takeaways of the user experience are still that (a) finding what you want is hard, (b) the Horizon content you don’t want to see gets prioritised and can’t be avoided, (c) the wheat and the chaff are randomly mixed together throughout the browsing experience in a way that boggles the mind, and (d) the recommendation engine is worthless and populates your screens with content you won’t be remotely interested in, despite the supposed supremacy of Meta’s user targeting engine. I could write a book about what’s wrong with this store from my perspective, or at least a bloody long Substack essay, but it is indeed a fairly horrible and challenging store to navigate. Credit where it’s due though, Meta’s refund policy is straightforward and fair (although has to be done through the phone app, not in-headset), and their (admittedly batshit-crazy) referral system continues to be a great way to save - and earn - money on your purchases.
And so on to PSN, and those two broken PSVR2 games I bought this last weekend. The details don’t really matter to the story here, but I’d be annoyed if someone told me they bought two games that didn’t work and didn’t explain why, so I’ll drop the relevant deets as I go.
The first was Epyka, a light-narrative based game with simple graphics and simple puzzles. The big draw for this game is probably the fact that you have a good looking cartoon dog along on the adventure, and I’d heard fond ramblings from various outlets about how well he’d been implemented. I was keen to see how cool this dog feature was but I never really found out. 15 minutes in, my dog was supposed to be solving a ‘puzzle’ when he disappeared. I say puzzle but it was just ‘wait long enough until your dog digs up something in the sand to move the game forward’. I’m not ragging on the game, this was early onboarding and the game was doing it’s teaching thing. All cool. But the dog just popped out of existence, which was not cool. I waited, reloaded, even restarted but the dog always disappeared and my avatar is apparently one of those blokes who can’t dig. Only the dog can dig in this world, because game design choices.
I even tried some doggy love but he still disappeared again right after I fed him an apple and tickled him behind his ears. Harsh. This is why cats rule. A cat would never ever eat an apple or try to help you solve a puzzle, and they always disappear whenever they feel like it. Cats manage your expectations expertly, so that you can never feel like a cat has let you down, only the other way around.
Just a bug of course. But it’s repeatable, and game-breaking, seemingly only for me. If this bug was common and players were suffering, waiting for a fix to be rolled out, this would be reflected by a proliferation of 1-star ratings, the fall-back ‘dirty protest’ that gamers will always make when they are granted no other feedback channel to express their sense of injustice. Not the case here. The game is sitting at 4.6 stars (out of 5) on the store. Ah well - £7 down, it might get patched eventually, and the dog might return. A little ruff (thank y’all!), but hardly the end of the world.
The next day I was reading some excellent reviews of Grit and Valour 1949 – a grid-based real time strategy game, and spotted it was 30% discounted on the PSN store. This looked like it was very much my bag - perfect for sit-down play, which is how I often have to enjoy VR because my lap has been pressed into taking on a second job as a pre-warmed cat bed, no reservations needed. And dammit I was still feeling excited to try a new VR game (my eternal weakness, folks), plus there were all these great reviews I kept reading. So I used up the last of my gaming budget and pulled the trigger.
Sigh.
V1.0 of the game is a shambles in VR and barely playable - and I’m not being hyperbolic. Things start badly - it launches in non-VR mode but due to some daft oversight it doesn’t recognise your VR controllers yet, so you sit on the title screen wondering why it’s not responding. Reload. Same. Reboot everything. Same. Having exhausted all the troubleshooting you can do without getting up from your chair, you stand, apologise to the cat that’s just scratch-slid down your legs, bumble across the room to find your Dualsense controller, bumble back, sit back down, apologise for sitting on the cat who had curled up in your warm vacated spot, then you can finally click past the start screen, swap controllers, and start VR mode.
But once you’re in, it’s clear it’s missed some testing before being rolled out for its multi-platform release. The first thing you notice is that, despite having laser pointers shooting out of your fingers, you can only move your forces by picking them up and moving them like board game pieces. This would be super fine and immersive, except the positioning is all out of whack. The unseen contact points that should be the end of your fingers are instead floating directly under your palm, so to pick them up you have to hover your palm over them and click your trigger. Not pinching them with your fingers, not clicking them with the pointer. Try either and nothing happens. Once you do manage to pick one up with a weird crab-claw feeling, placing them on the spot you want is a total crap shoot, because your hand obscures the board. 3 out of every 4 placements were not where I wanted the units to be. It’s unbelievably frustrating feeling like you’ve lost fine control of your basic motor functions when you’re just trying to move a teeny tiny tank 3 squares left on a board.
And because this is a Realtime Strategy Game, it means the game plays dynamically, with the enemies advancing on you and out-flanking you like a normal videogame. So trying to respond within tight time windows is essential. Here the squiffy controls prove to be fundamentally crippling to the gameplay. It feels like you’re playing wearing 3 pairs of thick rubber gloves and 5 broken fingers, and it steals the attention you need to be applying to the manic gameplay. Absolutely not intuitive, but clearly not intended. And then there were a ton of other issues – a rotatable game table that’s hard to rotate without looking and grabbing it carefully – miss this or the game pieces by even a millimetre and instead you’ll be dragging the whole game world around your head instead: an unexpected result that will be a huge discomfort trigger for some people, and just unpleasant for the rest. Tiny text on spatial menus that need the laser pointer but feature buttons too tiny to click on reliably, and a visual feedback system that makes it all more confusing than it needs to be. Floating windows that can get lost, flying vehicles that emerge through your face temporarily surprising you with a mass of polygons in front of your view, and map labels that stay static when the table rotates, rendering them useless and making everything extra confusing as soon as you rotate your view.
I was especially surprised by this. Grit and Valour is a little more prominent as both a flat-screen and VR release, having seen lots of positive press and enjoying 5 different dev teams working across the multiplatform release, including VR good guys nDreams. So it’s confusing to me that it’s gone out in such an obviously broken state and completely unplayable on PSVR2. I worked at PlayStation for a long time, and I’ve never seen anything in this state get through quality and certification testing. I can’t see how the PSVR2 version made it through those famously demanding gauntlets unless somehow nobody actually checked the VR mode. The problems are impossible to miss. This isn’t a dog disappearing 15 mins into the game, this stuff is obvious and problematic from the moment the game opens.
Regardless, it’s a new release, v1.0. It’ll get patched in a month or two. But as it stands, it’s pretty much unplayable. While you could try and overwrite a lifetime of manually handling objects by re-training your hand to interact in this entirely unnatural and unintuitive way, and learn to work around the foibles, what’s the point if it’s going to be patched? So… again … wait until the patch.
This isn’t particularly meant to be a gripe at the games themselves – I’m sure they’ll be grand and I’ll enjoy them well enough when they’re fixed. And even though I entered the industry a long time before the current mentality of release now, patch later became our prevalent reality, I’m not naïve enough to think we can ever wish those days back into being (Although Nintendo still somehow manage to barely ever need to update their releases past v1.0 or v1.1, so it’s not an impossibility when the publisher genuinely cares about offering a completed game at launch).
This mentality that we are just expected to wait for fixes after a game launches is one of the reasons why I rarely bother buying games within the first 6-12 months of release any more. That, and because by the time they’re all fixed and final, they’ll usually be discounted 50% or more from the launch price and you get to play the finished version, not the broken one. That’s no good for developers though, who make the majority of their revenue in the first 3-4 weeks of a game’s launch.
What’s especially frustrating about this is that for PSVR2, waiting for a broken game to be fixed is the only realistic option. Epic, Steam and Meta will all honour refunds on purchases as long as you’re not taking the mickey – the standard is 14 days since purchase and less than 2 hours played. Sadly, Nintendon’t at all as a policy, but their customer service will at least listen and consider some cases and grant exceptions where they can see the customer isn’t happy, but that’s still too many hoops to jump through.
On the other hand, PlayStation’s terms are notoriously restrictive; refunds are available for 14 days after purchase (keeping with the standard) BUT the possibility is terminated as soon as you start the download. This is in line with the EU’s requirements, but is less generous than all of the other platforms we’ve talked about. Those at least recognise they need to go further than the regulations and let users actually try a game out for themselves before accepting the sale as final and irrevocable.
The only exception for PSN (and Nintendo) will occur if the game is broken. In theory, anyway. In reality, it involves a multi-day process that used to start with requesting a refund through the Sony web portal (rather than simply requesting via the PSN store on the console itself), which can then get escalated to a ‘smarter’ AI chatbot, from where you can request to escalate to a customer service representative, who will then ask you all the same questions again and then say they’ll forward your case to a sector specialist who will take a few days to check if your request qualifies. Smooth.
On every occasion I have been through this process, it has resulted in dumb-as-spanners pre-authored replies that basically ask if you’ve tried turning it off and on again and are we, like, sure it wasn’t a PSVR1 game in disguise. There’s no next-step offered in the case that this is a software bug and not a hardware or user issue, even though the difference is irrelevant in terms of consumer protection. A store has sold you something that doesn’t work and isn’t offering a route to either fixing it or getting your money back.
The effect of this policy only benefits PlayStation. In most cases users will give up any hope and just keep their fingers crossed that it gets patched, especially for smaller priced games. Huge release screwups like Cyberpunk 2077 have seen PlayStation begrudgingly offer blanket refunds to every buyer in the past. Concord recently had something similar. But for smaller releases the amount of bad press necessary to publicly embarrass them into offering a refund isn’t likely to emerge. And lets remember, there’s an internal cost of actually having paid employees talk to you instead of a chatbot. You’re not only asking to get your money back from them, but your complaint is incurring additional costs for them to handle and, if you ever get that far, investigate. It’s awful but not surprising that PlayStation will just reply by sending what amounts to an automated ‘no’ at the end of this process anyway, closing the issue and preventing the disappearance of any more pennies, while keeping safe the payment they’ve already got off you.
Unless a PSVR2 game is lucky/crazy enough to offer a physical version you can buy on disc, the PSN store is the only place you can realistically obtain games for the headset. Games for Quest can be sideloaded from a variety of locations. PCVR’s natural home is Steam, but other stores do sell the same VR titles or you can buy direct from the publisher or developer from the same device. But with PSVR2, you only deal with PlayStation. And that means when a game doesn’t work, or works fine but makes you feel as sick as a sea-sick dog, you’re going to run into PlayStation’s infamous and reviled no-refunds policy.
So it’s Interesting, then, that Sony have just this week implemented changes to this policy. Lots of outlets are celebrating this as PlayStation finally addressing the problem. But this hasn’t actually affected the long-winded process you need to go through to request a refund, as far as I can tell. They’ve simply added the refund option through the PS app you might have on your phone, or through the PSN website. You still can’t request a refund from the store from your PS5 itself. So it remains to be seen whether this a change to their actual policy towards refunds, or if it’s just a slightly quicker, easier and cheaper way for them to serve up the same ‘no’ as before.
Regardless, even when the game is only suffering from post-launch bugs, the reality is that if you persevere with it now, you may never play it again after the fix to actually experience the developers intended version. It’s the classic argument why some people don’t like to dabble with early access, except nowadays the difference between early access and the v1.0 full access release is often indistinguishable to the common player except by the price jump. A broken unfinished game is just that, regardless of what ‘release classification’ it’s publisher or the store has assigned to it.
I struggle to think of any other industries where this is as commonplace as videogames. We’ve just grown to accept that a finished game won’t be a finished game when we play it. Sure, with smartphone apps, development can often be a constant rolling bundle of half-finished and half-broken disparate features in varying states of functionality. Every month you’re using a new version. But unlike apps in general, games tend to be a more tightly constructed whole, with systems and aspects all feeding in and out of each other in a complex web of dependencies. Any one part of a game that’s not working can deeply affect or break other parts of the experience. It’s incredibly hard to insert new game systems to a completed design. Even in live service games where this need is factored in as a core pillar, history has shown us that even the lightest changes and additions can have severe downstream effects to game balance and deeply affect the intended player experience.
And here’s the immersive twist. In VR, where you’re replacing the sights, sounds and feel of the real world with an entirely synthetic alternative, simple bugs can have many unintended impacts that might severely affect the user’s comfort. If there’s a bug in your Pinterest app, it’s not likely to make you start feeling nauseous or affect your balance or fuck with your expectations about how the world around you works. Trying to grab a little robot model and have the game make you drag the whole world around you instead is infinitely more damaging to the experience, and potentially harmful to some of your users. And since different users respond to different discomfort triggers in different ways, being able to try a VR game out for yourself is even more important at an individual level. Finding out that comfort information ahead of purchase should be a requirement, and its something store pages could cater to. Instead, PSVR2 users are left to hunt out reviews online to find out whether a VR game might contain specific movement systems or discomfort triggers they’re sensitive to.
I know when I was at PlayStation, from 2005-2017, they took this super seriously. They weren’t able to get a VR-specific exception to the usual no-refunds policy, but everything that could be done to check and double-check the quality of VR releases was done. There’s no way that broken games like these would have been allowed onto the store in the first place. The members of the UK store team I knew at the time were conscientious, dedicated and regularly fought to make sure every decision was putting the customer first. They took pride in how games were presented on the store, on how effectively they could help game discovery for players, and they did this on the basis that they knew every release had already been certified as tested and working before it would be allowed out of the door. They were aiming for the best buying experience possible. They were invested in the PSN store being carefully curated, standards being kept, and everything being as polished and corporately-professional as possible.
These days, like so many other platform stores, it’s descending into a tatty, AI-slop infested shambles. Sure, it’s 4K-shiny and corporate slick from the outside, but inside it’s doing a poor job of connecting with players’ needs and failing to keep up with the level of engagement players want to find. Sony has a monopoly on digital sales for it’s own platform, and that lack of competition means that there’s no imperative to improve their offering, and the likelihood of them ever offering a purchasing experience anywhere close to Steam’s is extremely remote. But Sony have repeatedly beaten back any attempts to topple it’s monopoly, removing their digital code sales from retail partners and shutting out 3rd party Key resellers in 2019, for example, and then facing off a class action lawsuit that followed in it’s wake in 2021.
Their refusal to offer easy refunds is skirting the UK’s Consumer Contract Regulations that we adopted from European Law during our badly planned (and by many like myself, much lamented) Brexit exit. This says that for Services and digital content, the customer has 14 days from the day after the order is made to request a refund. Here’s the twist that Sony seem to rely on: If you want to start a service within the 14 days, you will usually be asked to give your agreement in writing (i.e. agree to the EULA), at which point the right to cancel is lost. Interestingly, with a service you are still supposed to be able to get a refund during those 14+ days, minus the proportionate cost of the services you have used. The fact that digital purchases are actually limited licenses, and have always been, is something consumers are gradually waking up to, but it’s the basis of how Sony is dancing this little sidestep; they’re counting downloading the software as accessing the service, rather than actually running it, and while they do technically offer refunds under certain circumstances (thus complying with the letter of the law, if not the spirit) the practical route to obtain such a refund is long, laborious and impractical enough to encourage people to give up.
It’s a very corporate, anti-consumer approach that is extra harmful and inconsiderate for the specific needs of their VR audience. It’s obvious Sony cruelly left the new-born PSVR2 to sink or swim on it’s own, and it pleases me endlessly that the strong little duck is still managing to keep it’s head above water. It still represents one of the best consumer headsets available - as long as you have a PS5 and only want to play games. But the risk involved in spending your hard-earned on software that might not actually work, or might make you sick, without any form of try-out beforehand or recourse afterwards is a very dark mark against being able to recommend the headset. Unless you’re just using it with a PC, in which case, a very smart buy IMO - and the headset is currently seeing big discounts in some territories, so don’t let me put you off.
As Macy’s taught me 20-odd years ago, one bad experience can be damaging enough to leave a life-long impression. The PSN Store looks slick and serves up games without hassle. But it’s so huge, it’s the only store on the block. I’d be happier to have some choice in where to buy my digital games, and not have to face a miserable customer experience in the event that something’s wrong with the purchase. I’m sure I’m not alone. With more and more AI slop getting dumped onto the heaving shelves across the PSN Store, tatty and underdeveloped PSVR2 titles included, this is going to become more and more of an issue for both sides moving forward. But as PlayStation might say, it’ll hurt most especially for the VR players.
Until next time,
Jed
Jed Ashforth has been working in the games industry since 2002, and working with VR, MR and AR apps since 2010. He was part of the team that created PSVR at PlayStation, and has worked on around 150 XR projects. He has too many headsets and not enough time. If you’re interested to find out more (or even bring him on board to help you) you can reach him, and check out more of his work and articles, at www.realisedrealities.com.
All of my illustrations and text - in fact everything in this newsletter - is achieved without the use of AI. I like writing, and I enjoy doing graphic design. Call me human, but I like doing the fun bits myself.
