Sony just officially confirmed that PlayStation VR2 will not be able to play games that were made for the original PlayStation VR hardware. This important piece of information came courtesy of the latest episode of the Official PlayStation Podcast starting around the 29:10 mark.
Senior vice president of platform experience, Hideaki Nishino, confirmed that PSVR2 will not have backwards compatibility with the older games. Here is specifically what Nishino says about this unfortunate, but not entirely surprising, news.
"PSVR games are not compatible with PSVR2 because PSVR2's designed to deliver a truly next-generation VR experience.
"This means developing games for PSVR2 requires a whole different approach than the original PSVR."
"This means developing games for PSVR2 requires a whole different approach than the original PSVR."
PlayStation VR2 is slated to be released in early 2023.
But the backwards compatibility thing kind of makes sense from a technical perspective. What would be ideal is for those old games to be updated to run on PSVR2. You wouldn't want those old games running on an old API on what is essentially an emulator for those old APIs on the new hardware. You're going to have framerate issues then and framerate issues in VR are the absolute worst thing in the world.
Then between PSVR/2: The eye resolutions are different, the FOV is different, the entire tracking system is completely different. So, unlike 2D games, there's a lot more that has to go into making old VR work with new tech in a lot of cases, especially on a platform, like PlayStation VR and PSVR2 where everything is "fixed," and you cannot adjust it as you can on PC.
........Not going to lie, I don't even agree with my suggestions. They're... Not good suggestions. Hmm... I don't know what to say. No idea how to solve this problem, if this even counts as a problem. Understandably, there would be many people here who would say, "What problem? Are you making one up?" Maybe I'm overthinking this.