Sweet Surrender: A PlayStation VR2 Post-Mortem

Yacine Salmi is the founder of Salmi Games, the Munich-based studio behind Sweet Surrender. He works across design, tech and production, with a focus on VR-first gameplay and building for longevity. Here’s his breakdown of what they learned, what surprised them, and what they’ll be doing differently next time.

We recently launched Sweet Surrender on PS VR2, and I wanted to share our experience, partly to help other developers and partly to give a transparent look at how things actually went.

Sweet Surrender originally released on Quest and SteamVR in late 2021, and we’ve spent the last four years updating it with 14 major updates so far. It’s not a perfect game, but it’s a good one: on Quest we’ve held a 4.6 rating across 700+ reviews, and the PS VR2 players who have picked it up so far have responded in a similar way.

Around April this year, we decided it was finally time to bring the game to PS VR2. We passed certification in late July, announced it on October 9th, and launched three weeks later on October 30th. We kept testing and polishing all the way until release.

Our expectations were modest. If we could have managed 2,000 units in the first month, that would have been a solid success for us.

Reality was sadly very different: 84 sales on day one, and just under 350 units after four weeks.

That’s… not good. And this post-mortem tries to unpack why.

Key Metrics

• Units sold: 84 on day 1, ~200 by the end of week 1, ~330 by week 4
• Wishlists: ~1,800 at launch, ~2,100 by week 2
• Team size: 6 during original development (2020-21); PS VR2 port averaged ~1 full-time developer for six months
• Port duration: ~6 months, including major Unity upgrades and transition to OpenXR
• Estimated port cost: ~USD $50k (personnel, QA, PR support and platform-specific work)
• Certification: 3 rounds (each takes ~4 days)

Why We Chose PS VR2

A few reasons PS VR2 looked like a sensible platform for us:

• The port was relatively low-cost compared to building a new title from scratch.
• The PS VR2 community has been consistently asking for more high-quality games.
• We expected PS VR2 to be a strong “second-wave” platform with decent long-tail potential.
• Sweet Surrender’s accessible, arcadey shooter style felt like a natural fit for a console audience.

The opportunity felt reasonable. The risk felt manageable. The audience felt right.

What Went Right

Sweet Surrender isn’t a hardcore roguelike shooter; it’s arcadey and meant to be accessible while still offering a challenge to more hardcore shooter players.

We Delivered a Strong PS VR2 Version

We made full use of the hardware:

• Native 90fps with no reprojection
• Adaptive triggers
• Solid headset/hand haptic feedback
• A Platinum trophy (players really care about this)
• A wide set of comfort and gameplay options

We did miss capacitive support for the grip button, but that’s planned for an update.

Overall, we hit the technical expectations of PS VR2 players.

We Got Coverage from the Right People

We reached out to everyone, and we were lucky that most of the major PS VR2 creators covered us:

Our announcement and launch trailers appeared on official PlayStation YouTube channels (16k and 34k views), plus PlayStation Japan. Our PR team ensured we reached press and influencers, and we maintained a steady cadence of posts and high-quality clips across social media.

A Smooth Launch (really)

Anyone who has shipped on PlayStation knows how easy it is for something to go wrong in the backend configuration. We planned for the worst, double and triple-checking everything. In our case, the game went live globally, on time, and with no region stuck in a delayed “coming soon” state.

Technically, the build was solid at launch. This was a big contrast to our 2021 Quest launch, where a rare grenade tutorial bug could quietly break the entire game for affected players without crashing. The PS VR2 launch had none of that.

It’s a Good Game

Sweet Surrender has its limitations, but the core experience is solid and has proven itself over several years. The feedback we’ve received on PS VR2 so far reflects what we’ve consistently seen on other platforms: players who click with the game really enjoy it, and the updates we’ve added over time have made it noticeably stronger than the 2021 version.

What Went Wrong (or: what we learned)

Most of our missteps were strategic rather than technical.

Timing (we misjudged it across three dimensions)

This was our biggest mistake.

1. We launched into a very crowded holiday window

Players told us directly:

“I want your game, but there are too many new VR releases and I have to pick.”

October/November saw a surge of strong PS VR2 releases that we underestimated and maybe shouldn’t have. We’ve heard from other developers that we should do our best to avoid Q4 altogether. There will always be a rush of developers trying to release games before Christmas, and that can only dilute the possible attention you can receive.

2. We launched one week before Roboquest VR announced a release date.

Roboquest VR is an excellent and far more visible roguelike shooter. Its VR release date announcement landed right after our launch, and many players explicitly told us they were waiting for it.

3. We launched late in the PS VR2 lifecycle

A developer friend uses the “time-to-closet” metric – how long before a headset ends up unused forever.

PS VR2 is approaching three years old. The active addressable market feels smaller, and this mirrors trends we see across other VR platforms.

If we could redo anything: launch a year earlier, or even better – within the first three months of PS VR2’s release.

Pricing (we anchored ourselves to 2021)

We priced it at $25, the same as our original Quest launch.

But in 2025:

• COMPOUND (a common comparison point) is less expensive.
• The Light Brigade and Roboquest are priced similarly to us but are larger games.

We stuck to our original price out of principle, but realistically, a $15–20 price point would likely have helped first-month traction.

I still dislike the general “race to the bottom,” but pricing also has to reflect the current landscape, not what made sense four years ago.

Wishlists and Store Page Timing

We only announced Sweet Surrender for PS VR2 three weeks before launch because:

• We wanted to pass certification first.
• We wanted the store page to go live with the new trailer.
• We didn’t want to announce “too early.”

In hindsight, this was a serious mistake.

It’s not discussed much, but the PlayStation Store is wishlist-driven, almost exactly like Steam.

We should have published our store page in May, let wishlists accumulate naturally, and then done a release-date announcement later.

Release-date featuring from PlayStation would have been the same, but we would have entered launch week with far more momentum.

Visual Expectations

Sweet Surrender was originally built for Quest 1. We designed a stylized, low-texture, outline-heavy look that worked well for standalone headsets. Last year we modernized the pipeline with Bloom, HDR, and improved particles.

Despite that, some PS VR2 players commented on the lack of shadows and the overall “Quest-first” look. Others praised the smooth performance, but visuals still divided opinions.

If you’re targeting PS VR2, expectations lean toward modern rendering features, even for stylized art.

Platform-Specific Learnings

Working with PlayStation’s backend can be intimidating at first because it spans multiple systems and tools (store configuration, metadata, age ratings, trophies, builds, submissions, etc.). But once you understand how the pieces connect, the workflow is relatively logical.

Sony clearly put effort into making PS5/PS VR2 development more approachable and self-service than it used to be. Documentation is solid, and whenever we ran into issues, we were able to get guidance quickly. Getting modest promotional visibility (YouTube upload, some social support) was straightforward once we had our trailer and store assets ready.

Overall, our experience with the platform was positive. The real challenge was timing and visibility, not Sony’s systems.

Moving Forward

There are several things we would approach differently in a future PS VR2 or console VR release:

• Open the store page months in advance – even before certification – and treat wishlist growth as the primary objective (just like on Steam).
• Announce earlier and build long-tail visibility, rather than doing a tight three-week announce-to-launch cycle.
• Be more aggressive with pricing strategy, anchoring to the current market rather than our 2021 launch.
• Avoid crowded windows and major competitor landings, especially in the shooter or roguelike space.
• Target the early lifecycle of any VR platform, not the late one.

None of these would guarantee success, but they would have significantly improved our starting position.

While disappointing, this release isn’t catastrophic for us. Our company’s survival is (thankfully) not affected by it. Wishlist numbers are healthy, and the game may still find a second wind during future sales.

We will keep improving Sweet Surrender, though we’re unsure how long we can sustainably support it. The release did give us something extremely valuable: fresh external feedback from first-time players after years of working in the same ecosystem.

The PS VR2 community has been generous and supportive. This outcome isn’t their fault, and I don’t think it’s necessarily a commentary on the VR industry as a whole. It’s just the reality of a late-cycle release combined with some strategic mistakes on our part.

The VR-dev community has helped us more times than I can count. I hope in turn this write-up will help others avoid a few mistakes, or at least go in with clearer expectations.

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