When the PlayStation 4 VR headset launches this October , it’ll cost $400 That’s $50 more than the cost of a PlayStation 4 console — required to power the headset.
Polly I really enjoyed reading this Hub…I feel your pain completely. I have two sons that are 12 years apart and the Xbox addiction in our home as been awful. We call it possessed by Xbox. My older son is now a young adult and devotes a lot of his free time to the Black Ops Saga. For us I have learned from it with dealing with my younger son and installed and we use all of the parental controls of the Xbox and its entirely. This system has helped.
There’s an inherently isolating quality to putting on a virtual reality headset (at least in the user’s immediate vicinity). An area where Sony holds a particular advantage over PC gaming is in regards to command of the living room. To keep VR gamers and console gamers engaged, PlayStation will be offering local multiplayer thanks to what they call a Social Screen.” It will allow the PS4 to power both the TV and PSVR displays so someone with a PSVR headset can still sit on the couch and play with their buddies.
During my brief demo, a subway station went from dingy and dirty to me wading through an ankle-deep pool of blood toward a door. That immediately drew the infamous tide of blood erupting from the elevators in The Shining to mind. As soon as I reached the door, it shifted ahead, forcing me to reluctantly keep trudging forward. The next time I reached for the doorknob, it shifted again. Earlier, before the blood took over, I found myself walking backward down a flight of stairs to keep an eye on the vaguely human creature following me before it disappeared just out of sight.
The company didn’t need to add more noise by unveiling additional hardware. It would be crazy for Sony to try to pitch an upgraded PS4 at the same time as an accessory that costs as much as one. So it didn’t. In the meantime, PlayStation owners get to play with PSVR and save up for this future console upgrade if they want it. All the while Sony will be watching and learning. Is virtual reality going to be the next big thing? Or will we all be content playing on our 4K TVs? All of that will help shape the PS4 Neo, when it does eventually show itself.
To cut a long metaphor short: the winner of the current console generation isn’t Sony’s Playstation-it’s the global mobile market. The explosive expansion of the Chinese mobile market means that the real money in the next decade in gaming is going to be made there. At least if the western-born executive from China’s Internet powerhouse Tencent is to be believed.