5 ms·
this is a great biased TLDR article full of misconceptions as one can tell from the headline. I read through part of it and I had enough. I quote one of the ma
by ar9av 4y ago
this is a great biased TLDR article full of misconceptions as one can tell from the headline.
I read through part of it and I had enough. I quote one of the many misleading statements:
"So far, the gamble hasn’t paid off. Only 20 million Quest headsets have been sold"
The Xbox series S/X sold 20 million, the PS5 sold 30 million. Looking at these numbers, I'd say the Quest is pretty mainstream, no?
- mattl 4y agoAre they being actively used or are they just sitting in a closet somewhere?
- yamtaddle 4y agoI'm a gamer, my spouse is a gamer, and we have a Quest in the house because of my spouse's job. We're free to use it to play games or whatever, but we never do. We both tried Beat Saber the day she got the rig, and haven't done anything with it since. That was months ago. I have a gamer friend with a gamer spouse with multiple VR rigs from his spouse's job, similar situation, job doesn't care if they play with the hardware. He says he played them a bit for a couple months a couple years back, did the very small number of must-play games (mostly just Alyx and SuperHot, I think) and that was it, all of it's sat unused since then. Maybe we're not representative, but that's four-for-four of not really giving a shit about VR even when we're all gamers and the hardware's free.
- mattl 4y agoWhat's the rig? Is that more than the headset?
- yamtaddle 4y agoIn our case, just the headset. I think my friend has at least two or three, and whatever the "good one" is requires some sensors around the room or something, so there's a bit more to that one.
- mattl 4y agoI played an HTC Vive once, it was fun but it was a lot of stuff to play... I don't have the space for anything like that. Happy with consoles and Steam Deck (mostly in desktop mode) for video games lately.
- conorcleary 4y agoThe future of VR may be so intoxicating that the best proponents of it will be inside the virtual world instead of outside promoting it.
- dtagames 4y agoIt's pretty much an accepted reality that VR has not been a big success for anyone. Disney failed early with DisneyQuest. Second Life hasn't become popular even though VR hardware has existed for a long time. There's the complete joke called Magic Leap. MS decided to pivot to military applications because theirs didn't sell. Google gave up on Daydream. And Facebook just laid of 10,000 people, many of them in the metaverse department. The most likely reason is physics. These devices aren't fun to use. They're disorienting and make people sick. In practice, they add nothing to the experience -- certainly not the experience of a business meeting! It seems quite ridiculous to think that would ever have been a use case. So, the article really isn't a hit piece but perhaps a rather late and rather obvious commentary on something that even Zuck has to admit isn't a thing.
- trasz3 4y agoI’d say PSVR did quite well. Your examples above - from FB or Google - failed for the same reason everything else they try ends in failure - it’s a problem with those corporations and their “engineering culture”, not with VR.
- iamleppert 4y agoMicrosoft recently laid off nearly the entire HoloLens team. Even groups working on AI/ML for things like computer vision and scene detection / 3D understanding weren't spared. All they care about is a Chatbot these days.
- eclipxe 4y agoIt’s not accurate that many were from the metaverse org.
- 4y ago
- senttoschool 4y ago>The Xbox series S/X sold 20 million, the PS5 sold 30 million. Looking at these numbers, I'd say the Quest is pretty mainstream, no? Meta spent $100 billion[0] on VR to sell 20 million Quest headsets that most people have put in the closet. That's 30 years of total Sony R&D budget, including all the Playstations, Walkmen, VCRs, DVDs, Blu Rays, cameras, sensors, TVs, speakers, headphones, and even their own VR device. [0]https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/oct/27/metas-shares-dip-is-proof-metaverse-plan-never-really-had-legs-facebook https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/oct/27/metas-sha...
- sho_hn 4y agoI just can't believe figures like $100bn. How? On what? Spending $100bn is _hard_. For comparison, the Mars Science Laboratory project had a $2.5bn budget and sent a spacecraft that landed a rover on another planet. Yes, the MSC built on existing NASA infra and previous rover R&D ... but so did Meta's VR division.
- hotpotamus 4y agoI saw a post here yesterday praising Meta for drastically raising salaries for devs. Perhaps that has something to do with it?
- eclipxe 4y agoLots of fundamental investment in hardware and tech that is multiple years out. Displays, chipsets, input devices, etc. multiple lines of hardware beyond what you see today. Multiple OSes, lots of application teams, middleware, services, frameworks, etc etc.
- rajman187 4y agoIt wasn’t $100bn spent on VR. There is a ton of research happening inside of RealityLabs, which accounts for the vast majority of the investment, but yes the only product so far is the VR headset. Here’s a roadmap (supposedly based on leaked presentations) of what’s on the horizon—no pun intended https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/28/23619730/meta-vr-oculus-ar-glasses-smartwatch-plans https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/28/23619730/meta-vr-oculus-a...
- endisneigh 4y agoThe amount of headsets sold isn’t a good measure. Better to look at total ecosystem revenue.
- JohnFen 4y agoDoes Facebook have any significant VR revenue outside of headsets? What is their total ecosystem revenue? They didn't break that out in their last filing, so I can't tell.
- simiones 4y agoI think the point was exactly that - even it the Quest numbers don't look so bad when compared with XBox / PS5, they Quest ecosystem is actually peanuts when compared to the XBox or PS5 ecosystems.
- ketchupdebugger 4y agoIts different. Arguably all 3 is sold at a loss, they make it up with additional game/application purchases. Most game developers are making their games for xbox, ps5, and/or pc. They aren't making it for vr. There is a lack of application development for the metaverse. This is why zuck is spending 13 billion a year. They are trying to make the applications themselves. There's a lack of third party app/game developers
- rocket_surgeron 4y ago> I'd say the Quest is pretty mainstream, no? I think most Quests are doing what mine is doing: sitting in a drawer unused. In my case it was because my pupillary distance is too wide for the Quest (and almost every other VR headset) so everything looks blurry all of the time no matter what. It sucks being only slightly smaller than Hafþór Björnsson. Every person I know who has a Quest bought Beat Saber and Job Simulator, played for a couple of weeks, and then put it away.