Flight Simulator on PSVR2 Is the Biggest Thing to Happen to PlayStation VR in a Year

I have a confession. My PSVR2 has been collecting dust for months. Not because the headset is bad. The hardware is genuinely impressive. OLED panels, eye tracking, haptic feedback in the headset itself. But the library has been starving. After the initial wave of launch titles and a few standout ports, the flow of new PSVR2 content slowed to a trickle. Sony stopped manufacturing the headset. Developers started skipping it in favor of Quest. The PSVR2 felt like it was drifting toward the same fate as the PS Vita: great hardware that nobody made games for.

Then Microsoft, of all companies, dropped the single biggest VR update of the year on PlayStation.

What Sim Update 5 actually delivers

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 received Sim Update 5 during the week of April 20, and the headline feature is full PSVR2 support. Free. No separate purchase. No DLC paywall. If you own MSFS 2024 on PS5, you now have access to VR flight across the entire planet with all 125 aircraft in the game. Airliners, general aviation, helicopters, gliders. Everything.

The technical implementation is not a lazy port. Asobo Studio rebuilt cockpit interactions specifically for the Sense controllers. You reach out, grab yokes, flip overhead switches, and adjust throttles with your hands. The team developed a frame duplication technique specific to PSVR2 hardware to maintain smooth frame rates during complex scenes, and the update uses foveated rendering through something they call Flexible Scaled Rasterization, which leverages the PSVR2's eye tracking to render the center of your gaze at full quality while reducing detail in the periphery. The result is better performance without the visual compromises you would normally expect from running a game this demanding in VR on console hardware.

Why this matters more than another VR game launch

Flight Simulator is not just another title in the PSVR2 library. It is potentially the single most compelling use case for VR that exists in gaming right now. The entire Earth, rendered from satellite and aerial imagery, viewable from the cockpit of any aircraft, in real time weather, with live air traffic. I flew over my actual neighborhood last night. I could see my street. In VR. On a $450 console and a $550 headset.

That experience is something that no other VR game offers. Beat Saber is fun. Resident Evil Village is scary. Gran Turismo 7 in VR is great. But Flight Simulator in VR is something that makes non-gamers stop and stare. It is the VR demo that actually converts skeptics, and now it is running on the most accessible high-end VR platform available.

The PS5 Pro difference

I have been testing on both the base PS5 and the PS5 Pro, and the Pro is where this really shines. The extra GPU headroom gives Asobo more room to push visual quality while maintaining the frame rate VR demands. Dense urban areas that chug slightly on the base PS5 run noticeably smoother on Pro. If you own a PS5 Pro and a PSVR2, this is the best justification for that upgrade you will find outside of Gran Turismo.

The base PS5 experience is still solid. The foveated rendering does heavy lifting, and Asobo clearly optimized for the lower-spec hardware as a primary target. But if you are the type of person who notices frame drops over Manhattan, the Pro is the way to go.

Third-party add-ons are coming too

Sim Update 5 also opens the PlayStation Marketplace to third-party content for the first time. The first batch of add-ons has gone through Sony's platform certification, though some products did not meet PS5 performance requirements and are being reworked. For the flight sim community, this is huge. The PC version lives and breathes on third-party aircraft, airports, and scenery packs. Bringing that ecosystem to PlayStation, even partially, extends the lifespan of the VR experience significantly.

PSVR2 needed this

I keep coming back to the PSVR2 hardware story because it matters for context. Sony reportedly produced 2 million PSVR2 units and sold through roughly 600,000 in the first six months. Production stopped. New first-party VR titles from Sony all but disappeared. The narrative around PSVR2 became one of abandonment.

Microsoft Flight Simulator does not fix that narrative by itself. One game, even a game this large, does not replace a steady pipeline of VR content. But it does something important: it gives PSVR2 owners a reason to put the headset back on and keep it on. Flight Simulator is not a game you play for ten hours and shelve. It is a game people play for years. Hundreds of hours. Thousands, for the dedicated sim community. If this update gets even a fraction of the PC flight sim audience to pick up a PSVR2, it is the best thing that has happened to the platform since launch.

My PSVR2 is not collecting dust anymore. I have a flight plan from JFK to Heathrow tonight and I intend to fly every minute of it.