Me throwing around some BS numbers.
I've not seen all of the PSVR2 specs and stuff but it does sound like a huge improvement compared to PSVR1. The head vibration thing sounds cool and the controllers can also provide an inversive experience.
But I'm guessing that unlike the Quest that it will be a lot more expensive (will it be able to reach 10 million?)
My guess is that this will be when Sony finds out if VR is worth investing into. There were a number of issues with PSVR1 but it still managed to sell over 5 million units which is not terrible but compared to the 100+ million that the PS4 sold that is not a lot. Maybe it will manage to sell over 10 million units and maybe even 15 million. But I do have my doubts that it will sell over 20 million units (especially if it ends up costing $500USD for the HMD)
It's one thing for the HMD to sell that well but then you also have how much it cost to make games and how much those will sell. It will likely cost a lot more money to make better visual experience with PSVR2 compared to Quest and it seems like as of right now that the market cap for how much a VR game can sell is about 4-5 million units. Of which some AAA stuff like Alyx will very likely manage to sell over 2 million units in its life time as for it's profitability is a big question. It's safe to assume that Valve made 100% from their game since it was digital only and only sold on Steam (Steam keys were provided for those that purchased a Valve index, which is the only other way to get the game). The only marketing cost for this game seems to have been that one trailer that they did, so it's not like they paid money to a marketing company to advertise the money (some other companies will spend millions just doing this alone).
Let's look at some numbers
If the game sold 2 million units at launch and everyone purchased it at $60 (no regional pricing at all) you would get $120 million USD. If you had regional pricing (I'm just going to take a wild guess) you would be selling for $50 on average compared to $60? If so you would end up with $20 million less, so it's now $100 million USD.
My guess is that Valve made somewhere between $60-100 million USD off of Half Life Alyx, but the actual development cost is the big missing factor to see if this game was profitable (I think the only thing we know about development was that it took like 3 years to make and that it was a team of like 80 people)
On Steam I think the market cap for VR is something like 2 million for games sold with Alyx maybe being one of those games where every SteamVR user has a copy type of thing. And you look at Oculus Quest, just in the US alone it seems to have sold close to 5 million units (that's how much the PSVR1 did but in a much shorter time period and in only 1 region, US sales for the quest are likely like 40-50% of world wide sales)
By the way it seems like $30 million-$100 million is what a successful VR game can expect. With Beat Saber 2 being one of the few games that can make over $200 million USD and a big part of that has to do with it selling DLC as well with song packs. It seems like it sold over 40 million units in DLC alone and the game sold over 4 million last year and this is all being multi platform. Roughly 40% of that is from just DLC alone. By the way this is not even taking the 30% into account. So that 200 million could even be as low as $140 million but seeing as how FB owns Oculus and the devs, it might be $160USD or maybe some more (so after 4 years the most money that one of the most popular VR games that is multiplatform and that also has paid DLC can make is $170 million USD. But in reality most will be in that $30-100 million USD bracket that I mention before. By the way in it's first year on PC when it was in early access Beat saber made like $12 million USD (I don't think they had song as DLC yet? So that's not included with that $12 that I mentioned)
When it comes to VR FB is different than Sony,Valve, and other because they will end up making up for that lost cost in hardware and in software with ads and selling people's personal information, which is their end goal with that whole metaverse thing (which Sony and other may also try to do but as of right now that doesn't seem to be the case)
If stuff like Valve Deckard does turn out to be true, I wonder how well it will do, there is still stuff on SteamVR that people can play and new stuff is still being made. Some SteamVR stuff may never make its way to Quest 2, but it might make its way to PSVR2 (that would be a possible $1k cost) and stuff like Valve Deckard would be something in between both of them, the Quest 2 MSRP is $300-$400 depending on the storage option that you choose and the PSVR2 grand total will be closer to $1k. The index kit cost $1k, of which the index stand alone is $500, which is likely how much the PSVR2 is going to be sold at with a loss. Some of that might also be due to scale since the PSVR2 may be able to sell upwards of 10 million units while the Index will sell maybe 500k lifetime? (At this point it's likely already sold over 150k units) so for $500 you do get an impressive set up from Sony. The index controllers are $280 for a pair ($150-$200 is my guess for the replacement cost of the PSVR controllers. A regular DS controller is already $70. So $150 for the controllers and $350 for the HMD, which is a lot more compared with what the quest 2 has to work with, with $150 of that already being just for the controllers, so the quest 2 is just $150, so $200 is a big difference). $150 just for the index light houses. So right off the bat the Deckard would be $850 and depending on what they do for the controllers (just dropping the price by $50) you will end up with a wireless stand alone HMD for $800USD or so.
I was going to add more information but this is where I'm going to end it for now.
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