Studio behind popular VR social MMO Rec Room ‘can’t justify the cost’ of bringing it to PS VR2

25.01.2024 - 20:21 / videogameschronicle.com / Meta Quest / Chris Scullion / Ios

There are no plans to bring the popular VR social MMO Rec Room to PlayStation VR2, because the studio behind it can’t justify the cost.

As reported by UploadVR, Rec Room CCO and co-founder Cameron Brown held a Reddit AMA session earlier this week, inviting players to ask him questions.

One user asked Brown if there were ever plans to bring the game to PlayStation VR2, with another pointing out that since they upgraded from PS VR1 they were no longer able to play it since PS VR2 doesn’t feature backwards compatibility.

Brown replied that the team couldn’t justify the expense of porting the game to PS VR2, implying that there weren’t enough PS VR2 owners to make it worthwhile.

“No current plans to bring Rec Room to PS VR2,” Brown replied. “We’ve looked into it, it’s a non-trivial port, and we haven’t found a way to make it make economic sense.

“In an ideal world we would love to bring Rec Room to PS VR2, but we just can’t justify the cost based on the numbers. Sucks I know, but that’s the truth.”

A Rec Room spokesperson later confirmed this in a statement to UploadVR, saying: “Cam is correct. We’re not working on a PS VR2 port right now. Would we in the future? Sure, if it makes sense for the business.

“We’ve worked with Sony for years and have had a lot of successful collaborations there. We’re always looking to broaden the number of platforms Rec Room is available on and plan to keep expanding the number this year.”

Rec Room is available on Meta Quest, Pico 4, SteamVR and the original PlayStation VR, and can also be played in non-VR on other systems like PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Android and iOS. In 2022 the studio said it had over 3 million active users per month on VR devices.

PlayStation VR2 was released in February 2023, but Sony has still yet to officially confirm how many units it has sold.

Estimates by research firm IDC suggested sales had started slowly, with around 270,000 units likely sold by the end of March 2023.

IDC’s vice president of data and analytics Francisco Geronimo said at the time: “I suspect a price cut on the PSVR 2 will be needed to avoid a complete disaster of their new product.”

On the day PlayStation VR2 launched, Sony released Horizon: Call of the Mountain and a VR update for Gran Turismo 7. However, since then, the only other first-party title released for the headset was Firewall Ultra, an online team-based shooter which was released in August and received a Metacritic score of 61.