I would guess it's because psvr1 depended on an external camera for tracking from both the headset and controllers. The new headset has internal cameras and a completely new control system. I would expect it will be each developer that has to make their old game psvr2 compatible.

Surely the games used a high level API that Sony could support with this. I doubt games had any code related to external camera tracking, the system must've just spit out the position of the headset to the game.

The controller is pretty different, and I don't think the original PSVR games were written with an abstraction for that like Steam games are.

VR PC games manage to run on Quest, Vive, you name it - the controllers being different isn’t a very compelling argument why they’ve not given any backwards compatibility support.

As for the software abstraction being poor, that’s also just bad engineering on Sony’s part then.

Their claim is complete horseshit. They must have decided that including the previous game library was not worth the development effort of an API translation layer. Hope they're right...

It's not complete horseshit. The old controllers have more buttons on them and the new controllers have thumbsticks, so the controls for PSVR games won't map to PSVR2 hardware.

If you have a PSVR, you probably have the old controllers too.

Some games presented the Dual Shock 4 controller visually tracked in game, even if they managed to do a compatibility layer those games still relied on tracking the DS4 controller light via the camera.

But at least some devs have confirmed their psvr games will be patched to support the new version, like No Man’s Sky.

Unfortunately not everyone is like the folks who work on No Man's Sky. They have released a boatload of fixes, new content, engine updates, VR support, you name it, they keep delivering.

Their support of that game has been very impressive over the years. Launch was rocky, sure, but they recovered and kept pushing ahead.

Seems trivial then to simulate that.. still seems like a false narrative on Sony's part

Yeah, I'm a little bummed about this. Maybe it's a combination of the controllers and the increase in resolution/etc. With the gen 1, you had the move controllers and a remote camera. Games were probably developed with that in mind - even if they knew some changes were coming down the pipe, it would be difficult to write the games with the VR2 system in mind.

Whether or not this is all abstracted away, I have no idea... but there really is a pretty huge difference between 1 and 2 if you think about the camera set up and the controller situation. The move controllers were optional - they didn't even come with the system. I think there were bundles that had them. They came out BEFORE the VR system did, and were kind of a gimmick until the PSVR landed.

Now that you have a real high quality headset, that ships with standard, hopefully high quality controllers, the target application should take advantage of those things.

There's so much great (and under-appreciated) content for PSVR, I really hope Sony has some kind of upgrade path tooling for developers to "remaster" existing titles for PSVR 2.