US import logs spotted by TweakTown suggest Sony sent out thousands of PSVR 2 development kits in recent months.
The original PlayStation VR has been on the market for over five years now, designed for the PS4 using PS3-era motion controls. Sony confirmed a new headset specifically for PS5 was in development just over a year ago, revealed the name and specifications in January, and finally showed the headset design three weeks ago. You can sign up to be notified when preorders begin.
When revealing the headset design Sony said “development kits are already in the hands of game creators”. The company didn’t say how many kits had been sent out, but US import logs show five huge shipments of “DEVELOPMENT KIT FOR INTERACTIVE ENTERTAINMENT SOFTWARE” entering the country from October 2021 to January 2022:
- 13 October 2021: 240 boxes
- 23 October 2021: 240 boxes
- 2 November 2021: 480 boxes
- 7 December 2021: 980 boxes
- 29 January 2022: 434 boxes
These 2374 boxes are listed as coming from Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE), the Sony subsidiary responsible for the PlayStation brand.
You may wonder if these shipments could merely be PlayStation 5 consoles, but it released two years ago and these logs only started appearing in October – 8 months after Sony confirmed PlayStation VR2. There’s been some speculation about these being for a possible PS5 Pro, but it seems far too early in the console’s lifecycle for that to be the case and Sony is still struggling to meet demand for the current PS5 amid an ongoing chip supply shortage.
Larger companies may have gotten multiple or even dozens of kits, so we can’t know exactly how many development teams have a PSVR 2. But over 2000 boxes shipped suggests Sony could have dozens, if not hundreds, of VR games in development for the headset.
