Sony has aknowledged that the Oculus Rift, the main competitor to Sony’s PlayStation VR, is of higher quality than the PlayStation VR but recognized that’s not necessarily bad.
“If you just talk about the high-end quality, yes, I would admit that Oculus may have better VR,” Masayasu Ito, vice president of Sony Computer Entertainment, told Polygon. “However, it requires a very expensive and very fast PC. The biggest advantage for Sony is our headset works with PS4. It’s more for everyday use, so it has to be easy to use and it has to be affordable. This is not for the person who uses a high-end PC. It’s for the mass market.”
While Oculus Rift will demand a high-end PC, PlayStation VR only requires the PS4, which makes the latter a more affordable option.
Comparing it to Sony’s PS3, having such an expensive device on the market was clearly not the right move. Learning from it, Sony launched the PS4 at $399 and now the PlayStation VR will have the same kind of strategy.
“…we took the things we regretted with PS3 and made PS4 on top of that. So therefore our development of PS4 and VR is in some ways a reaction to when we had a hard time with PS3.”