I’m convinced that I’ve forgotten about more games than I’ve actually played this year. It freaks my bean thinking about the fact that Fire Emblem Engage, Dead Space, and Hi-Fi Rush all cam🎃e out this year. 2023 was so jam-packed with high-profile games that a bunch of games decided to move their release date to February 2024 just to get out of the way, and now February is overcrowded. It was i๊nevitable that some things would fall through the cracks in a year like this, but I never expected that Sony’s PlayStation VR2, which launched with nearly 40 games this past February, would be one of them.

The PSVR2 has not been a hit for Sony. In January it was reported that Sony had slashed its six-week sales expectations from 2 million units sold down to 1 million, and then ultimately went on to sell just shy of 600,000 in that time frame, just 8 percent ahead of what original PSVR sold in its first six-week run. But then in May, Sony claimed this was actually ahead of its projections - so who knows. Either way, it's a mere fraction of the 20 million Quest 2s that have been sold, which represent a tiny sliver of the entire video game market. Whether or not PSVR2 sales are meeting Sony’s expectations, it’s not surprising that no one is really talking about it.

The $600 price tag is a major factor that limits the appeal of the headset, but the bigger issue is its poor selection of games. It’s hard not to see a connection between the PSVR2 and the PS Vi꧋ta, a similarly impressive piece of hardware that also failed to attract an audience because of its meager library. And while the PS Vita may have been a little ahead of its time, as the success of the Switch clearly demonstrates, the PSVR2 could be primed to move VR forward in a big way. But it needs games to do that.

When the headset launched earlier this year, I was critical of the fact t𝄹hat the launch library was made up almost entirely of ports of older Meta Quest and existing PSVR games. The PSVR2 only launched with two exclusive new games - Horizon Call of the Mountain and The Dꦇark Pictures: Switchback - and two VR conversions - Resident🌠 Evil Village and Gran Turismo 7. The rest of the games you could play were all available on other VR devices that are both cheaper and standalone. Where were all of the big budget VR exclusives meant to entice PS5 players into buying the new headset? They weren’t there in February, and we’re still waiting.

That’s still the PSVR2’s biggest problem, but eight months after launch, I’m starting to wonder if it’s even going to get the big🍬 VR heavy-hitters that already exist. If you don’t deliver new games, the least you can do is make all the other popular games available. But Sony isn’t doing that either.

The biggest miss is obviously Half-Life: Alyx. The best VR game of all time from one of the most popular franchises in gaming is still largely inaccessible to players, including even many VR players. It’s unthinkable to me that Sony would launch the PSVR2 without this game. Even if Valve made it difficul𒁏t and expensive, Sony should have done whatever it took to get this one on its headset and prove to everyone why a $600 console-dependant VR device has value.

But there’s so many more games that would instantly increase the value of the PSVR2. The 69 PSVR2 games in the PlayStation digital store do not include Boneworks, Shell Games’ Until You Fall or the I Expect You To Die Series, Asgard’s Wrath, The Room, The Climb, Myst, Pavlov, or Blade and Sorcery. None of the Insomniac games - a studio So🍸ny now owns - are available on the PSVR 2, including my personal favorite, Stormland.

Games that were on the original PSVR are not compatible with the PSVR2, and most of them have not been rereleased for the new headset, including Iron Man, Superhot, Arizona Sunshine, Blood & Truth, Astro Bot Rescue Mission, and🉐 The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners.

Virtual Reality is not popular enough to not include intergenꩲerational games on new hardware. Meta understands this, and all Quest 2 games will be available on the Quest 3 when it launches later this month. Some of those may be Quest exclusives, but It’s unthinkable that the PSVR2 costs as much as it does and yet is missing more than 20 of the most foundational modern VR games. Then again, it’s not the first time Sony has launched new hardware and then failed to support it with enough games.

I don’t want the PSVR2 to suffer the same fate as the Vita. The technical specs ﷽of the PSVR2 are just as impressive today as the Vita&rsquoಞ;s were in 2011, but no one cares about graphics or refresh rates if there aren’t enough games to play, and neither Horizon Call of the Mountain or Uncharted: Golden Abyss are strong to be system sellers all on their own. There’s no way to know if porting more of its day’s most popular games would have saved the Vita, but I’d hate to see Sony make the same mistake twice.