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> If there is going to be a metaverse, I'm not sure I want Facebook to own it. It's like a bad sci-fi pulp story. I'm confident I don't want them to own it - o
by carbonguy 5y ago
> If there is going to be a metaverse, I'm not sure I want Facebook to own it. It's like a bad sci-fi pulp story.
I'm confident I don't want them to own it - or for it to be owned by a single party of any kind, for that matter.
> Given their investment and research, I wonder if they should open it all up (even if contradictory to short-term gains in ad revenue) so it has a chance to grow?
I mean, that would be nice for users, but:
a) I don't think Facebook is constitutionally* able to give up ad revenue gains: what they do is maximize ad revenue, basically
b) I strongly suspect they have other means at their disposal to maximize growth. After all, every FB-IG-WA user is a Meta user now, right? How much would it cost to just send every one of them an Oculus headset for free?
And if that sounds insane, consider that this announcement is basically saying "we're betting our entire brand on this particular future" - I suspect they'll do everything in their power to make that bet succeed (or appear to succeed).
* in the sense of "this is the fundamental basis and goal of the company," not in a U.S.-founding-document sense
- cbtacy 5y ago> How much would it cost to just send every one of them an Oculus headset for free? That's the wrong question. The right question is "how many FB users would accept a free headset that advertisers paid for in exchange for access to your data and exclusive rights to place ads in front of you?"
- srveale 5y agoWe can answer this by looking at how many facebook users are okay (implicitly) with using facebook in exchange for access to their data and exclusive rights to place ads right in front of them. The answer is 100%
- TheOtherHobbes 5y agoThere's a world of difference between sharing cat/dinner/vacation photos with friends and family and living in some kind of fantasy animated cartoon world. The social dynamics are completely different. Second Life showed that very clearly. The three biggest things in Second Life were fantasy consumerism, fantasy entrepreneurship, and fantasy sex. Unless FB is getting into those markets it's going to find the metaverse a tough sell. Not least because the whole point of fantasy is that it's not really you. So that immediately conflicts with FB's only-real-identities dogma.
- mftb 5y agoFB is already in those markets. FB and Instagram are every bit as much fantasy land as Second Life. I agree with you that the social dynamics are different.
- FormerBandmate 5y agoI would highly doubt 100% of Facebook users would want to use virtual reality. Out of those who would tho, it would be pretty high, I doubt many Facebook users would buy HP Reverbs after that. Not worth the absurd cost tho
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- kroltan 5y agoNo, that question is wrong, because that answer rounds up to 100%. Maybe a vocal minority like us HN-folk, but I don't think that by ourselves we really matter in terms of numbers.
- cbtacy 5y agoExactly. You could assume that it's likely that something like 2.75B (out of the est 2.89B) FB users would happily wear (free) physical spyware in this scenario.
- mepiethree 5y agoMy wife put on an Oculus Quest and threw up within 5 minutes from simulator sickness. In this case, I think the average HN-Folk is _more_ likely to be interested in VR than the average person
- kroltan 5y agoMy late step-mother put on an Oculus Go and played basically every rollercoaster simulator available on the device back-to-back. It was like the Matrix scene where Neo was learning, then leaves the simulation and says "I know Kung Fu". She used computers for social media and looking up recipes, so not very savvy at all. I don't think there's a correlation between interest in VR and technicality. Maybe between _vocal_ interest in VR and technicality.
- mandevil 5y agoCounterpoint: the HTC First (aka the Facebook Phone) was >$1 USD less than a month after it debuted, and still was a gigantic flop. Facebook Portal has sold ~1 million units. Oculus has sold ~8 million units or so (all numbers based on quick googling, might be wrong). So people reject Facebook hardware all the time, and they don't actually have that much in the way of hits in the HW space.
- FormerBandmate 5y agoIt was $1 on a two-year contract. It was also a bad phone. That really doesn’t say much
- Apocryphon 5y agoIt says that they’re lacking in the hardware department.
- perryizgr8 5y agoThe phone is a bad example. It was a shitty phone. There was absolutely no advantage to using it. On the other hand, oculus is state of the art in virtual reality. I don't know if any other hardware or ecosystem as well developed as theirs is.
- sircastor 5y agoThe trouble I have is that the cost for using the system is the same as if you try to buy your own Facebook-free headset. The advertisers still demand all your info and demand to be able to sell to you. I feel like we’re all hoping that there will be a VR version of the early web, free and open, and mostly just neat things to connect with or about. I worry there is increasingly no chance of that.
- mepiethree 5y agoIsn’t that what the state of VR has been for the past decade? I used an Oculus for the first time in 2013 and it was exactly that feeling of exploration and joy
- alasdair_ 5y ago>b) How much would it cost to just send every one of them an Oculus headset for free? $300 * 3 billion people, so $900 Billion give or take which coincidentally is right around the market cap of the entire company.
- swyx 5y agoretail price != manufacturing price, so say just 2-300 bil
- akelly 5y agoFacebook isn't making any money selling headsets at $300
- usrusr 5y agoFreak spikes in demand cause freak spikes in supplier parts prices. Manufacturing volumes of complex goods are quite inelastic. Burst manufacturing price would likely be much higher than steady flow retail prices, not lower. Zuckerberg would basically have to redirect humanities entire smartphone manufacturing capacity for multiple years. Including the part that usually ends up sporting some fruit brand, this wouldn't be cheap at all.
- uuddlrlr 5y ago>I don't think Facebook is constitutionally able to give up ad revenue gains This "fiduciary duty" meme really needs to die. Seriously the idea of fiduciary duty [to maximixe profit] is dystopian, corporations don't fuck us over because they have to they do it because they can. Edit: clarify
- throwawaycuriou 5y agoI also blinked at that. But then took it to mean constitutionally in a pure sense - whether they can keep a strength of belief enough to follow through. Unrelated to 'The Constitution' from a US citizen's point of view. Although now I'm pondering just how misplaced and powerful our reverence of that cobbled together document is.
- carbonguy 5y agoYou are correct, that is the sense that I meant it. I'll edit my comment to clarify.
- uuddlrlr 5y agoThanks for clarifying! The constitution is pretty far from fiduciary duty legally, so I apologize for not interpreting it more charitably. (In general the maximize profit meme does need to die tho)
- MandieD 5y agoIt’s basically a peace treaty. There are things about it that I think are incredibly counterproductive to democracy (and they were designed to be so!), but I shudder at the thought of rolling the dice on scrapping or heavily re-writing it.
- thatguy0900 5y agoIt seems like the government agencies are more than comfortable ignoring it anyway, frankly.
- 5y ago
- Impossible 5y agoFor b) assuming each Quest costs Meta around $400, and they are sending to 1B users, $400B, so about half their market cap and 10x yearly revenue :).
- wlesieutre 5y agoThey sell the Quest for $200, do you really think they're losing another $200 on each unit?
- Impossible 5y agoThey are sold at a loss or at best at cost. $200 is possibly extreme, but I couldn't find a BOM estimate for Quest, so it could be much higher than that. This isn't unusual, most game consoles are sold at a loss initially. Also, even though I said "Quest" in my first post I meant "Quest 2" as the original Quest is being phased slowly out, and Quest 2 has sold significantly more units. The current retail price of the 128 GB model is $299, and 256 GB model is $399. So if you're bothered by my price difference assume I was talking about Quest 2 256 GB sold at cost. Regardless, it would cost them more than they want to spend. If you watched the keynote yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg specifically mentioned not wanting to lose too much money on hardware while still selling it at the lowest price that makes sense... Giving away hardware for free is the complete opposite of that strategy.
- elil17 5y agoAs to point B, they don’t even need to send one to all users - just the ones they think will be cash cows for advertisers. Everyone with a income and behavior pattern that makes them a super valuable ad demographic (say, 5% or even 1% of users) gets one for free while the rest of us pay our way on.
- carbonguy 5y agoThis is an extremely interesting idea - I wonder if they'll start some kind of "invitation beta" for this fraction of users you describe.
- thrwyoilarticle 5y agoMy outsider understanding of advertising is that the most valuable marks are the richest. So the PR might kill that.
- adventured 5y ago> How much would it cost to just send every one of them an Oculus headset for free? $200+ billion. They can't afford it. They couldn't get the manufacturing for it, either.
- carbonguy 5y ago> They couldn't get the manufacturing for it, either. A very good point. I think the financing would be less of an issue, honestly; $200 billion a lot of cash up front, but spread out over five or ten years it's well within their FCF if they wanted to allocate it that way. EDIT: As another comment pointed out, FB might also be able to convince advertisers to subsidize some (or all) of the costs of "free" headsets for the masses, if they wanted to try this scheme.
- jrochkind1 5y agoAt this point I'm confident I don't want there to be "a metaverse" at all, because under our current social and cultural systems, I am confident it will be very very bad no matter who owns it.
- bsenftner 5y agoThis is the sad reality. Our society is simply not structured to protect the end-users of any such service in any meaningful way. Our political and ethical leaders are simply too embedded with selfish interests. The Metaverse will be a fleece the customer engine, with the rate and manner it is developing.
- prawn 5y agoSo, pretty similar to life now for many people? :|
- FormerBandmate 5y agoThe internet exists under our current systems and, although there are parts of it that suck, it’s dope
- jrochkind1 5y agoSo I might have a less optimistic analysis of the plus/minus of the internet, but more importantly, I think it was created under very different circumstances, in it's birth-years, by actors with different interests, values, and goals -- than the "metaverse" will be. The metaverse will be much worse.
- baby 5y agoYou mean it was created by the army?
- CincinnatiMan 5y agoContext clues lead me to believe the person you're replying to probably means more of the people who created the early world wide web (nerdy tech folks), and less so the people who created the technical pieces of the internet.
- ben_w 5y ago> How much would it cost to just send every one of them an Oculus headset for free? About 0.6-1 trillion dollars, give or take.
- Tenoke 5y ago>How much would it cost to just send every one of them an Oculus headset for free? 20-50 times what they earn per user.
- carbonguy 5y agoI doubt it's THAT high a multiple - in 2020 they earned just over $32 per user [1] and an Oculus Quest 2 retails for $299; one assumes the manufacturing cost is lower, meaning the multiple is likely 9x or less. Of course, the essence of your point is true: Facebook doesn't make as much per year per user on average as a headset costs. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/234056/facebooks-average-advertising-revenue-per-user/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/234056/facebooks-average...
- Tenoke 5y agoThis is revenue and not profit and I've seen a lot of articles claiming that they are almost definitely selling headsets at a cost already[0]. Point stands either way for giving them free and selling at a cost is just a lesser version of that at any rate. 0. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.pcgamer.com/amp/oculus-will-sell-you-a-quest-2-headset-that-doesnt-need-facebook-for-an-extra-dollar500/ https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.pcgamer.com/amp/oculus-will...,
- ipaddr 5y agoHow much would it cost to just send every one of them an Oculus headset for free? 3 billion fb users x 100 per unit = 300 billion A letter to everyone would cost 3 billion