Sony is certain to sell many PlayStation VR headsets

Sony has continued to perform well in the field of virtual reality and has sold 4.2 million PlayStation VR systems worldwide, the company said in an article published Monday on its blog. This is the total of units actually purchased by consumers, not just shipped.

"We are also very pleased to announce that we have officially sold more than 4.2 million PS VR systems worldwide as of March 3, 2019." said Sid Shuman, Social Media Manager at PlayStation. "We would like to thank our fans for the incredible support they have given us to help us achieve this milestone."

As VentureBeat points out, the latest estimates give Sony a head start on the competition. The company IDC wrote that it was setting sales of PS VR at around 463,000 in the fourth quarter of 2018, ahead of Oculus Rift (300,000) and HTC Vive (230,000). The main advantage of the PS VR headset over the competition is that it is natively supported by its eponymous console, the most popular on the market and generating significant revenue for Sony. In addition, Oculus and HTC headsets require expensive computer configurations: the lowest Mag Mag-recommended graphics card, the GTX 1060, costs more than half as much as the PS4 Pro.

As VentureBeat points out, PlayStation also has a major advantage in introducing games to the virtual reality market because of its leverage with developers:

PlayStation is also a globally recognized game brand with many development partnerships. The publisher has taken advantage of these relationships to bring to PSVR experiences of great renown in virtual reality. This includes hits like Tetris Effect and Resident Evil 7. And that adds to the efforts of his first party like Farpoint and Astro Bot: Rescue Mission.

Sony today announced the number 4.2 million as part of its state of play video event. During this presentation, the publisher unveiled a number of new PSVR games and release dates.

The success of PS VR has also allowed Sony to perform well when announcing the next generation of consoles. The next PlayStation is already in development and should be announced in the coming months, although the final schedule for the release of the system remains unclear.

[VentureBeat]