Did Sony just win the VR war?

Sony announced this morning that the Playstation VR headset will cost US$400. And in doing so, it delivered a crushing blow to Oculus and Valve/HTC.

When it comes to top-end virtual reality devices, there are really only three worth discussing right now: the Oculus Rift, the HTC Vive, and Playstation VR. The first two devices announced pricing earlier this year, and the numbers were…not great. The Oculus Rift will run you US$600, and that’s before you include the price of its controllers, let alone the beefy PC you’ll need to actually enjoy it. The HTC Vive is even more expensive at US$799, and it requires just as powerful a computer. If starting from scratch, you should expect to have to spend nearly US$2,000 to fully enjoy either one of them.

A full Playstation VR setup will cost you less than half that. If you don’t have a PS4, you can get those as low as US$350. Then you’ll need the Playstation VR headset (US$400), the Playstation camera (US$50), and Move controllers (around US$50). That’s a full high-end VR setup for around US$850. Even when you factor in the price of an online subscription and a bunch of expensive PS4 games, going from zero to total VR is still going to be cheaper on Playstation than it is on PC.

Let’s put it this way: which one would you buy?

Now granted, that’s not a totally fair comparison to make, because the Vive and the Rift are more powerful devices, and when combined with the expensive PCs needed to run them, they’ll be able to produce more realistic imagery than the Playstation VR is capable of. But graphical fidelity doesn’t always win out over price considerations. That’s a lesson Sony learned years ago when its expensive and more-powerful PS3 was soundly beaten in sales by Nintendo’s far less powerful Wii. And that was a price difference of just a few hundred dollars. It’s hard to imagine many average consumers ponying up an extra thousand for better visuals if they can get comparable experiences on Playstation VR.

Obviously, we can’t yet compare the quality of the VR experiences of each device. If the Vive or the Rift gets some exclusive, mindblowingly-awesome VR game or ends up being developers’ platform of choice, then the price differential could matter less. But all other things being equal, the Playstation VR price seems to give it a significant advantage.

I mean, let’s put it this way: looking at those prices, which one would you buy?