Holy fucking yuck.
Every Sony vr gamer just paid for another 20 years of meta mind control.
I knew this thing was going to flop. It was the same thing with PSVR1, they marketed the shit out of it, released it and then one year later it was basically already forgotten about.
I remember commenting on Reddit at PSVR2 release that I wasn’t falling for it again, and got called a fucking idiot and told I didn’t know what I was talking about blah blah blah. Then they just literally did the same thing again. Like PSVR1. Like Vita. Like their proprietary headphones. Like PS Move. Like PSP (which was a banger). Like PS5 arguably.
The walkman never left the minds of their electronics and computing division. Build it and others support the ecosystem that makes it worth buying, rack in on peripherals.
Did Concord really fuck them up that badly? I’m confused as to what’s going on internally with them.
Sony wants to fail on all fronts at this point. It’s wild for a company with such a history.
Meta: Where VR goes to die.
Where all things go to die. They haven’t done anything noteworthy in a decade. Their main IP is the fact that they own everything you post on their site.
Sony used to make all kinds of electronics, and the quality was usually pretty good. What is their core business these days?
They’re an insurance company in Japan, which i think it’s where most of their money comes from.
Charging extravagant prices for minimal product?
Camera hardware? Like not just pro cameras, but also many of the smart phone sensors
Live service swill and fucking their customers over by monopolizing the PlayStation games market
https://www.sony.com/en/SonyInfo/IR/library/presen/er/pdf/26q1_sonypre.pdf
If you look at what AI has done to hardware prices then it’s smart to get out now.
they sold their TV products to TCL, which was the bread and butter to them for decades.
The company shareholders are enjoying its slow death, with the usual cash grab on high sale value and peak profits for them then “fuck the sony workers” approach.
I miss how nice their Sony Vaio laptops looked, and the swappable faceplates. I hate that everything now is plastic black, matte black, or white.
Sony is sorta like Ubisoft, they made great things in the past but now seem determined to disappoint their customers.
Didn’t Walmart buy TCL?
No its a public and state owned Chinese company, who actually have factories in 30 countries around the globe.
I was confused. Walmart bought Vizio.
Not sure, but Walmart runs onn which also have TVs.
Sony has been a pretty big player and investor in VR and 3D headsets and displays for decades, so they have a lot of patents compared to relative newcomers like Meta. This will surely shrink the innovation pool.
To sell now means they just don’t see VR tech as being profitable over any meaningful timeframe, but I know it comes as part of a wider ‘exit from hardware’ Sony is doing… maybe VR will prove profitable medium term for others, but I see Meta has burned $19bil last year on VR and isn’t expecting profit any year soon, at about a 20:1 burn rate… So who knows.
Pretty sure big tech has lost the plot and Sony is activating parachute mode while there’s still cash on offer.
With a lot of the decisions Sony has been making recently, I think they just want to roll over and die. Loudly proclaiming anti-consumer practices and other things to piss off literally everyone isn’t the kind of business strategy I would go with.
Japanese megacorps and anti-consumer practices are certainly nothing new though.
All that’s really changed lately for Sony is a sell-off of some of their hardware arms. Why? Anyone’s guess. But with such a heavily-diversified portfolio of businesses and rising profit share each year in the billions, I don’t think I’d be betting on them dying anytime soon.
It’s a smart move by sony. Apple, google, and meta all spent zillions of dollars on vr/ar development, and yet all of them didn’t get significant consumer uptake, and all of them don’t see profit even on a remotely envisionable horizon. So it seems very smart to get out of that market, especially now while you can still get back a lot of money from selling your patents
Why is Valve selling VR headsets then?
Somebody needs to sell something that isn’t an enshittified dumpster fire of a platform, right?
Same reason they make any hardware - because ‘computer gamer’ is a self-selective higher income demographic, so Valve can charge higher than their component cost and if it succeeds, great, hopefully that’ll translate into more Steam store game sales that they take 30% of (the real profit). If not - no big loss, since very little was invested/risked under that model.
Valve don’t make any of their budgets or financials public, which makes analysing “is this a profitable market sector” near impossible with respect to them.
How is that related to what i said in my comment?
Another reason to hate Sony.
