This week, Beat Saber developer Beat Games announced it was cutting support for the PSVR2 and PSVR versions of its popular rhythm action game.

The news is devastating for Sony’s headset: while the PS4 version of the title is a little long in the tooth these days, the PS5 edition is still an excellent way to enjoy one of the premier virtual reality games available.

In the official PS Store sales charts for May 2025, the title finished third and sixth in the US and Europe respectively in the PSVR2 category. That’s despite it being among the best-selling titles for the peripheral since it released.

To be clear, Beat Saber is not going away entirely: multiplayer support will be removed in January 2026, but the game and its many content packs will remain available to purchase for the foreseeable future. It won’t, however, get any new DLC or updates moving forward.

There’s a big piece of context here that we must address before we continue: Beat Games is owned and operated by Oculus Studios, so it’s a subsidiary of Meta these days. Therefore you could argue that the organisation has little incentive to continue supporting a product that could be considered a rival to its range of Meta Quest headsets.

However, we’d counter that if Beat Saber was seeing significant engagement on PSVR2, there wouldn’t necessarily be incentive to pull the plug on support. The developer will know how many people are purchasing and playing its game on a monthly basis, and we’d hazard the numbers overall are quite low.

This all strikes us as a death knell for PSVR2, which is a great piece of kit but has never really found its footing.

The original PSVR was not only a more affordable novelty but was also strongly supported by Sony, with essential first-party titles like Astro Bot Rescue Mission, Blood & Truth, WipEout Omega Collection, and more.

Sony’s never extended the same support to PSVR2, and while Horizon Call of the Mountain was a jaw-dropping introduction to the hardware, it failed to follow it up with anything of note. Gran Turismo 7 is mind-blowing inside the headset, but it’s a rare example of the hardware being leveraged by a first-party studio.

To its credit, the company’s done a decent job of ensuring third-party developers are motivated to support the peripheral, and there have been some very good games released for the headset over the years, specifically the likes of Resident Evil Village and Resident Evil 4 from Capcom.

But while we expect a steady trickle of content throughout the rest of the generation, like the upcoming Lumines Arise, this does very much feel like the beginning of the end now.

So, what went wrong? Well, it doesn’t help that the peripheral launched with a higher price than the PS5 console itself, which was always going to be a tough ask. While the price could perhaps be justified by the quality of the hardware, including the much more precise controllers and increased screen fidelity, it was never going to fly in a more challenging economic environment.

The original PSVR was rudimentary and flawed, but at $399 it was much more affordable than the PSVR2’s significantly higher $549. PSVR also felt like much more of a novelty at the time: Sony took the hardware on the road, promoting it in malls and at gaming expos, something it never really replicated with its successor.

With the Meta Quest establishing itself as a competent standalone option, the combined price of a PS5 and PSVR2 was always going to be a challenging hurdle to overcome. Many argued and still argue that the wired nature of PSVR2 was an impediment to its success, too.

But software will always be the most important aspect of any piece of hardware, and it became evident quite early on that Sony simply wasn’t going to support this device. With its first-party studios focused on making traditional titles and the manufacturer seemingly reluctant to fund original content from third-party studios, PSVR2 faced an uphill battle from the start.

Unfortunately for fans of the medium, VR hasn’t really matured into the mainstream success many predicted a decade ago, and while the likes of Meta Quest and other PC-based headsets will likely continue to carve out niche audiences for themselves, it doesn’t seem like Sony sees this as the growth vector it once did.

It’s a shame because PSVR2 was an impressive iteration on the original PSVR, righting many of the original hardware’s wrongs. But with the novelty eroded, the first-party software support anaemic, and the price pushing away most consumers, it does increasingly look like the book is closing on this particular endeavour for now.

What do you think the future holds for PSVR2? Does it still have bright days ahead of it, or is it another in a long line of under-supported Sony accessories? Come back into the real world and let us know your honest opinions in the comments section below.