6 ms·

They wouldn't have lost nearly as much if they had just kept the Oculus headsets for their original purpose, mainly VR gaming, and marketed them better to consu

They wouldn't have lost nearly as much if they had just kept the Oculus headsets for their original purpose, mainly VR gaming, and marketed them better to consumers, instead of pivoting so hard on AR, the bullshit "we'll all be living and working in the Metaverse" skit, and mandating Facebook accounts, therefore alienating the VR users, gamers and game developers in the process, basically their entire user market. The Quest headsets are great tech, well priced, and they have some cracking games that get you hooked, but the marketing to the general public was next to non-existent, and the whole mandatory Facebook account plus the paradigm shift from games to AR and Metaverse soured them badly. If they want to salvage this they need to go back to VR games only.

broast 3y ago
I do think AR is the Oculus's best feature and most exciting for games.
- throwaway4aday 3y ago
  It really is, high quality passthrough is an entirely new experience especially for people who aren't really into full VR. Even if you're comfortable with VR, using a mixed reality app allows you to keep interacting with people around you which takes that VR time out of isolation and puts it back into daily life. I'm very curious what the rumoured Quest 3 Lite is going to be, I'm guessing it'll be something similar to the Immersed Visor targeted at AR with limited VR capabilities.
soared 3y ago
Meta verse is a long term play, VR gaming is profitable now. FB doesn’t really care about the gaming all that much, but gobs of profit from meta verse advertising, real estate, cosmetics, etc would be worth risking and losing tens of billions in dev costs right now.
- indymike 3y ago
  > Meta verse is a long term play, Metaverse is old. It's literally the dream of the 90s and 00s. Linen labs, second life, every animated live in a village game ever. There is no log term play for the "metaverse". There is for VR computing platforms. Unfortunately, Meta has missed that boat trying to take on the Wii and Wii U lobby. As a concept, virtual universes are actually popular, when you take away the requirement of VR headsets. The barrier of entry is about the cost of an indy game or maybe, a A game title. My kids spend more time playing in the Animal Crossing and Minecraft universe than on the oculus by a mile. Check that, they spend more time in the Goat Simulator or Deeeeer universe.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  >Meta verse is a long term play Maybe, but in practice they tried to force a low quality immature tech, to the already skeptical general public, way too soon. They should have kept it brewing in their basement and release it gradually years in the future when it would be more mature.
- cmiles74 3y ago
  Meta's handling of the Oculus strikes me as one of the shortest "long term plays" I have every seen. Meta cares a lot about profit and they've turn a maybe-soon-to-be-profitable division into one that's dug a hole billions of dollars deep. Now the board is unhappy with these losses, teams have been downsized and they are back where they started minus billions and billions of dollars.
- 2muchcoffeeman 3y ago
  I don’t understand this. Unless VR gaming was a net loss, why wouldn’t you keep investing in it? If you were currently making a profit from gaming, shouldn’t you just hedge your bets and continue to make money?
  - dageshi 3y ago
    A profitable division in a small market (relative to facebooks ad business) just isn't worth the effort. They had to spin it into the "metaverse" which is this mythical thing that might be big enough theoretically to make "real" money for them.
  - tsimionescu 3y ago
    The thing is that VR gaming seems to be a tiny niche. Even if profitable on paper, is it really worth the organizational costs to maintain a division that addresses a tiny market with no synergies of any kind with the rest of the business? If this was not the case, you would see lots of Facebook restaurants or cleaners or hair salons etc. since these are all easy to make profitable.
    - 2muchcoffeeman 3y ago
      How does it not synergize with the metaverse? If it takes off , there will 1000% be games. And why would a division that makes money have some negative organisational cost?
    - paulddraper 3y ago
      Restaurants are notoriously difficult to make profitable. And when they are, it's usually <5% margin.
  - rchaud 3y ago
    Simple answer: the stock price. If gaming is profitable but the ads business is more profitable and less capital intensive, you would be advised to stick to ads. Particularly when it's expensive to borrow. Reality Labs have spent $20bn already. How much does the return on that capital have to be to convince the stock market that it was a good idea?
- ToucanLoucan 3y ago
  > FB doesn’t really care about the gaming all that much, but gobs of profit from meta verse advertising, real estate, cosmetics, etc would be worth risking and losing tens of billions in dev costs right now. The problem is the users largely don't give a shit about any of that. What VR adoption there is among the public is exclusively gaming, apart from the weird crypto-web 3 adjacent real estate scams going on in this second life clones. Which, while they have a lot of big numbers to throw around, most of it has been a massive [insert fart noise] in terms of generating anything tangible like new technologies or better performing systems. It's just a crypto sub-culture that includes some (notably bad) VR games bolted to their sides. Like I have just never seen any evidence at all that regular people are interested in the lightest in participating in any of these metaverse spaces. Video conferencing has purposes, and we saw that demonstrated well during the pandemic, but like, doing what is basically video conferencing with shitty graphics and bland visuals with everyone running around as corporate-art-styled avatars just... sucks ass. It really tremendously sucks and offers no real benefits over standard Zoom calls which we already have numerous profitable services offering. That, combined with collaboration spaces like Slack and Teams and good old telephones has basically all business communication covered, and none of it is made better in the slightest with the stupid metaverse proposed by Facebook. And for the public, I mean, what can you even say is better? Wandering around a crappy 3D mall to shop for products is infinitely more work for a customer than just opening Amazon. We've already learned this lesson! For a while there we had websites that emulated traditional storefronts with image mapped jpegs representing products on offer and just like... no. The market spoke deafeningly loud: It was WAY EASIER to shop from a list of things to buy instead, and it was way, WAY easier for businesses to maintain those lists rather than building what amounts to a custom videogame to sell their products within. VR is really cool tech. The metaverse is a dud and Facebook doesn't have enough money, nor really does anyone, to force it the way it would have to be to see wide adoption.
  - throwaway4aday 3y ago
    You run into trouble when talking about "the public" the same noises were made about the internet back in the 90s but the discussion forum of the day was major news outlets, newspapers, magazines, etc. since "the public" weren't on online forums. Those that were saw that the internet was going to be huge but they were a tiny minority of nerds, enthusiasts and university students who didn't have much of a voice in the traditional media. Ironically, internet forums are now the traditional media to the nascent social metaverse. The people using those tiny virtual communities are once again the nerds, enthusiasts and students who don't have a lot of reach outside of their own communities. A confounding aspect is the real time and unrecorded nature of interactions in the metaverse. Unless you're a streamer who also publishes their previous streams there is little record of the social activity happening there. There are no web pages or blog posts no search and no links and the social graphs are contained within whatever app you are using so they're only available to participants. In effect, the metaverse is entirely invisible to the traditional web but it's a one way mirror since web content can be pulled into the metaverse inside flat windows, which seems another parallel to the early internet on which people posted content from traditional media but the media didn't at first broadcast content originating on the web. Anyways, all this is to say: don't let yourself get blindsided by a new paradigm while you're resting on the laurels of the last revolution.
- nelsonic 3y ago
  Nope. FB ("Meta") are shoveling cash onto a bonfire and will not reap the benefits because a competitor that people trust will beat them to produtc-market-fit long before they recoup their "investment".
  - usrusr 3y ago
    Yeah, but if you buy into the first mover advantage assumption that might well be too late. He who invented the virtual sword fighting algorithms shall never be defeated and all that. They could also just pretend to buy into the first mover assumption, if a large enough fraction of the stock market does, that will be good enough.
    - nelsonic 3y ago
      I know you're playing devil's advocate but at this point it's just sunk-cost bias ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost#Fallacy_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost#Fallacy_effect Yes, I agree that that the AI-generated virtual worlds are getting better each day, but Mark & Co are making a pretty massive assumption that people (a) want to spend large amounts of time in a virtual world and (b) his virtual world. We'll see very soon from the uptake of the Apple Vision Pro how many people want that (virtual) reality. ;-)
- CPLX 3y ago
  There's no metaverse. There's not going to be a metaverse. Nobody wants a metaverse.
  - throwaway4aday 3y ago
    I want a metaverse, speak for yourself
- corimaith 3y ago
  The institutional knowledge and skills from building a mature VR gaming landscape could arguably be used as a stepping stone to their "metaverse" though.
- xorcist 3y ago
  The strategy to not care about gaming today because it won't be dominant in the future is hard to understand. Given that we will spend all our days in VR in 10 years or so, who will own that space? The company that designs future products today and only needs to sit on it for a decade until the technology and human society have caught up? Or the company that goes all in on VR gaming, a technology that exists today, and completely owns that space until the technology is mature enough to branch out beyond gaming?
  - cedilla 3y ago
    "Given that"? Is there any reason to assume that VR will be anything other than a niche of a niche in rich countries in such a short time frame?
    - Philpax 3y ago
      I think they were presenting that as a conditional, not as a sure-fire bet. With that, though: the access to the technology is getting cheaper and cheaper, thanks to no small amount by Meta's subsidies [0]. If it does take a pivotal role in our technological future (which I believe it will, but I'm not expecting you to), I would imagine it'd end up being like the smartphone: many vendors will sprout up and drive costs down, especially for low-income markets. [0]: https://www.androidcentral.com/gaming/virtual-reality/meta-quest-lite https://www.androidcentral.com/gaming/virtual-reality/meta-q...
- kranke155 3y ago
  The Meta verse is an impossible dream. Thinking a single company will own it is like thinking a single company could own multiplayer gaming, cloud documents, and remote work. It’s an impossible, absurdist maximalist goal that I don’t see how any company could fully deliver on. Hardware is just hardware. Apple builds hardware that then becomes an ecosystem. Reality Labs was trying to build the hardware AND the ecosystem AND the apps. This on top of an unworkable concept for Human Computer Interaction - Virtual Reality - which consumers have already rejected over and over again. There will be no consumer market VR headset because the concept is fundamentally alienating. I suspect there are a lot of people on the spectrum in IT who seem convinced that somehow this is a tech problem. IT IS NOT, nor will it ever be. Getting in a VR headset and being in a reality where no one else is ever there, nor will they ever be (in the next 10-20 years, there is no tech that reliably emulates full body capture, not to mention touch and smell, two key parts of the human experience) is fundamentally unpleasant for the general public, because the general public, quite correctly, places a very high level of reward to being around other people, co regulating emotions, reading body language, and kissing and having sex. Since none of that is mapped into VR, the concept of a general use VR OS with a consumer market is fundamentally dystopian and perhaps even physiologically and psychologically unsafe. Having said that - I have worked in VR since 2014 and anyone in their right mind will tell you that Reality Labs was a dumb idea. There is not, and there won’t be for a very long time, any mass consumer market for VR (billions of units) because VR is anti human, anti connective and is most likely bad for people if they use it for long hours.
  - minton 3y ago
    I think VR can enable human connection where it otherwise isn’t possible due to distance. Of course, it isn’t a full substitute for in-person interaction, but it doesn’t have to be either or. We can have a great remote connection via VR and still exist in the real world. Check out this podcast[0] between Lex Fridman and Mark Zuckerberg where they meet remotely via the metaverse. [0] https://youtu.be/MVYrJJNdrEg https://youtu.be/MVYrJJNdrEg
    - kranke155 3y ago
      I don’t know that many people who would prefer this to a Zoom call. Plus this is not full body scanning, it requires you (again) to lose all perception of the real world (zoom doesn’t) and even the scanning that was used for this call requires a full body scanning room which you know, no one is going to have. Both Lex and Zuck went through a significant scanning process to get this level of fidelity. Plus again there is no reason whatsoever to do this in a VR environment vs an AR environment using the Apple Vision Pro (which is a real product that has potential, since it’s not VR).
- rchaud 3y ago
  This comment reads like it came from 2021 when Carmack was still there and it maybe looked like they were serious about it. Absolutely nobody is interested in VR anything from FB as long as Zuck is the pitchman.
tonmoy 3y ago
I feel Quest is so well priced because Meta is probably losing money trying get consumers to buy them
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  That's what all console makers did to gain market share though. Sell cheap HW on the loss, then make it back on games sales. And VR tech is still expensive and not commoditized yet like consoles which are now just PCs.
  - bigtex 3y ago
    Not true. Nintendo historically made profit on every game system that came out, which explains their use of older, cheaper technology. I don’t know if this is true for the Switch though.
    - nscalf 3y ago
      Nintendo also makes notoriously bad consoles (by spec, not uniqueness). Their IP is more of the reason they succeed than is the case for most consoles. Their hardware is always years behind the specs for competitors.
      - Gigachad 3y ago
        We have long since reached the point where top tier specs don’t matter that much. Gameplay isn’t being held back by the hardware anymore.
    - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
      Old and cheap technology like Nintendo uses doesn't work to sell VR. You gotta be at leaser somewhat cutting edge. Plus Nintendo has several failures, the Virtualboy, the Gamecube, WiiU.
    - wk_end 3y ago
      Definitely true of the Switch. I’m not sure if it’s true of their older hardware, though - the FC, SFC, N64 and GC were all fairly advanced for their times and still modestly priced at launch. The N64 in particular was a pile of high-end custom silicon - if they weren’t selling at a loss, they were getting one hell of a sweetheart deal from SGI and Rambus. My understanding is that the “old technology” approach guided their portable lineup more than anything, and only started to be adopted by their mainline consoles as they started to struggle there and felt they needed a different approach from Sony/MS to compete.
paulddraper 3y ago
> mandating Facebook accounts FWIW, that was only ever a requirement for Occulus Quest, and they removed the requirement over a year ago.
- IggleSniggle 3y ago
  FWIW, they told me I would lose my entire Oculus library if I didn't change from a simple Oculus email login to a Meta account and all that entails (I'm a CV1 owner). Threatening the loss of a few hundred dollars of software unless I gave up my privacy definitely left a sour taste in my mouth. I didn't even care about the Quest, they just decided I wasn't going to be able to use my software anymore.
  - paulddraper 3y ago
    Yeah, I think they were planning on doing that at one time.
- juliangoldsmith 3y ago
  Is the headset usable without any kind of account? A quick search suggested you'd still need a Meta account of some kind (allegedly separate from a Facebook account).
napo 3y ago
I heartily agree with you, but on this point: > and they have some cracking games that get you hooked My main issue with VR is that I only got hooked to Beat Saber. There are some other titles that I quite liked (I expect you to die, demeo), but they never had other games, to the level of Beat Saber, for me to be really excited with the platform.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  >My main issue with VR is that I only got hooked to Beat Saber. But that's subjective, no? I personally never got hooked on Beat Saber but instead on 'In Death Unchained'. Like I said, the main problem is marketing. There are great games and experiences out there but probably few know them because there's no hype around them the way there is for Cyberpunk, GTA, CoD and other mainstream AAA franchises that drive insane amounts of money just form preorders of buggy games.
  - dsgnr 3y ago
    Seems more objective to me in that the quest has shitty software beyond one or two games. One or two games wont carry a platform very long regardless of marketing. Shitty software hurts the hardware most.
    - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
      >Seems more objective to me in that the quest has shitty software beyond one or two games. "Yeah, well you know, that's just like, your opinion, man."
ivanb 3y ago
AR is for seeing what the customer is seeing and feeding customized ads and specialized offers. It is the ability to show smaller prices to poor and bigger prices to wealthy, increasing margins. It is an invaluable tool for marketers. It is potentially big big money for Facebook but meager offering for customers. VR is for luring users into AR advertising dystopia. Metaverse is a masquerade. Too bad for them they spent so much on the 3D red herring.
PaulHoule 3y ago
I just got a Meta Quest 3 and boy am I blown away. I've been working on a long term art project where I make things like https://mastodon.social/@UP8/111219354336635872 https://mastodon.social/@UP8/111219354336635872 and https://mastodon.social/@UP8/110721329572538223 https://mastodon.social/@UP8/110721329572538223 you don't see it in those photos but when those things are done they get a barcode that lets you "flip over" the cards. I started developing them a few months before Zuckerberg announced the metaverse and felt in many ways my work was related. (e.g. I can go to a conference and pass out 20 cent glasses to the audience so they can view my 3-d images) I've known for a long time that the cards were going to have an MR component the same way the real numbers have the imaginary numbers, it was a matter of time. That time has come. There is a demo for the Quest 3 where your room gets invaded by little aliens and you have to shoot them to catch them and stuff them in a container. Chunks of your wall and ceiling fall away and you can see out to an alien world outside. It's just amazing. I am showing the demo to as many friends and family as I can so I can get good at presenting it and then I am going to show it to museum directors and similar people because I really want to sell something like that to somebody like that. It's now possible to make something like a theme park experience at a dramatically lower cost. If the technology becomes really mainstream there will be a limited window that this can be sold as something place-based but if it is slow to take off that window is longer. The Quest 3 has gotten about 1% of the excitement that Apple Vision has but it is here and now and I think fully realized. I think also Meta has learned from many of its marketing mistakes because Zuckeberg wants to win that one. To confront the "people play with it then abandon it" they are providing a license to a game that comes out in a month. I think you'll never see another creepy Zuckerberg avatar. People are so burned out on Meta that the story has been almost buried but I think a lot of people are going to try a Quest 3 and become a believer.
MilStdJunkie 3y ago
The "social media" requirement with AR also sent us reeling in mil-spec-landia, where every little widget HAS to be insulated - or at least insulate-able - from wide area networks, and anything that needs a cloud to run is DOA. Sure, I guess you can configure an image on GovCloud or one of the other ITAR cloud services but . . have you ever tried to deploy a consumer app image on a NIST-and-FEDRAMP-and-WHATEVERELSE-certified container? There's a reason the big vendors just give up and run on-prem. You end up with a whole other release of your software that you get to maintain, forever. Maybe this has gotten better in the last few years . .

broast 3y ago

I do think AR is the Oculus's best feature and most exciting for games.

throwaway4aday 3y ago
It really is, high quality passthrough is an entirely new experience especially for people who aren't really into full VR. Even if you're comfortable with VR, using a mixed reality app allows you to keep interacting with people around you which takes that VR time out of isolation and puts it back into daily life. I'm very curious what the rumoured Quest 3 Lite is going to be, I'm guessing it'll be something similar to the Immersed Visor targeted at AR with limited VR capabilities.

soared 3y ago

Meta verse is a long term play, VR gaming is profitable now. FB doesn’t really care about the gaming all that much, but gobs of profit from meta verse advertising, real estate, cosmetics, etc would be worth risking and losing tens of billions in dev costs right now.

indymike 3y ago
> Meta verse is a long term play, Metaverse is old. It's literally the dream of the 90s and 00s. Linen labs, second life, every animated live in a village game ever. There is no log term play for the "metaverse". There is for VR computing platforms. Unfortunately, Meta has missed that boat trying to take on the Wii and Wii U lobby. As a concept, virtual universes are actually popular, when you take away the requirement of VR headsets. The barrier of entry is about the cost of an indy game or maybe, a A game title. My kids spend more time playing in the Animal Crossing and Minecraft universe than on the oculus by a mile. Check that, they spend more time in the Goat Simulator or Deeeeer universe.
FirmwareBurner 3y ago
>Meta verse is a long term play Maybe, but in practice they tried to force a low quality immature tech, to the already skeptical general public, way too soon. They should have kept it brewing in their basement and release it gradually years in the future when it would be more mature.
cmiles74 3y ago
Meta's handling of the Oculus strikes me as one of the shortest "long term plays" I have every seen. Meta cares a lot about profit and they've turn a maybe-soon-to-be-profitable division into one that's dug a hole billions of dollars deep. Now the board is unhappy with these losses, teams have been downsized and they are back where they started minus billions and billions of dollars.
2muchcoffeeman 3y ago
I don’t understand this. Unless VR gaming was a net loss, why wouldn’t you keep investing in it? If you were currently making a profit from gaming, shouldn’t you just hedge your bets and continue to make money?
- dageshi 3y ago
  A profitable division in a small market (relative to facebooks ad business) just isn't worth the effort. They had to spin it into the "metaverse" which is this mythical thing that might be big enough theoretically to make "real" money for them.
- tsimionescu 3y ago
  The thing is that VR gaming seems to be a tiny niche. Even if profitable on paper, is it really worth the organizational costs to maintain a division that addresses a tiny market with no synergies of any kind with the rest of the business? If this was not the case, you would see lots of Facebook restaurants or cleaners or hair salons etc. since these are all easy to make profitable.
  - 2muchcoffeeman 3y ago
    How does it not synergize with the metaverse? If it takes off , there will 1000% be games. And why would a division that makes money have some negative organisational cost?
  - paulddraper 3y ago
    Restaurants are notoriously difficult to make profitable. And when they are, it's usually <5% margin.
- rchaud 3y ago
  Simple answer: the stock price. If gaming is profitable but the ads business is more profitable and less capital intensive, you would be advised to stick to ads. Particularly when it's expensive to borrow. Reality Labs have spent $20bn already. How much does the return on that capital have to be to convince the stock market that it was a good idea?
ToucanLoucan 3y ago
> FB doesn’t really care about the gaming all that much, but gobs of profit from meta verse advertising, real estate, cosmetics, etc would be worth risking and losing tens of billions in dev costs right now. The problem is the users largely don't give a shit about any of that. What VR adoption there is among the public is exclusively gaming, apart from the weird crypto-web 3 adjacent real estate scams going on in this second life clones. Which, while they have a lot of big numbers to throw around, most of it has been a massive [insert fart noise] in terms of generating anything tangible like new technologies or better performing systems. It's just a crypto sub-culture that includes some (notably bad) VR games bolted to their sides. Like I have just never seen any evidence at all that regular people are interested in the lightest in participating in any of these metaverse spaces. Video conferencing has purposes, and we saw that demonstrated well during the pandemic, but like, doing what is basically video conferencing with shitty graphics and bland visuals with everyone running around as corporate-art-styled avatars just... sucks ass. It really tremendously sucks and offers no real benefits over standard Zoom calls which we already have numerous profitable services offering. That, combined with collaboration spaces like Slack and Teams and good old telephones has basically all business communication covered, and none of it is made better in the slightest with the stupid metaverse proposed by Facebook. And for the public, I mean, what can you even say is better? Wandering around a crappy 3D mall to shop for products is infinitely more work for a customer than just opening Amazon. We've already learned this lesson! For a while there we had websites that emulated traditional storefronts with image mapped jpegs representing products on offer and just like... no. The market spoke deafeningly loud: It was WAY EASIER to shop from a list of things to buy instead, and it was way, WAY easier for businesses to maintain those lists rather than building what amounts to a custom videogame to sell their products within. VR is really cool tech. The metaverse is a dud and Facebook doesn't have enough money, nor really does anyone, to force it the way it would have to be to see wide adoption.
- throwaway4aday 3y ago
  You run into trouble when talking about "the public" the same noises were made about the internet back in the 90s but the discussion forum of the day was major news outlets, newspapers, magazines, etc. since "the public" weren't on online forums. Those that were saw that the internet was going to be huge but they were a tiny minority of nerds, enthusiasts and university students who didn't have much of a voice in the traditional media. Ironically, internet forums are now the traditional media to the nascent social metaverse. The people using those tiny virtual communities are once again the nerds, enthusiasts and students who don't have a lot of reach outside of their own communities. A confounding aspect is the real time and unrecorded nature of interactions in the metaverse. Unless you're a streamer who also publishes their previous streams there is little record of the social activity happening there. There are no web pages or blog posts no search and no links and the social graphs are contained within whatever app you are using so they're only available to participants. In effect, the metaverse is entirely invisible to the traditional web but it's a one way mirror since web content can be pulled into the metaverse inside flat windows, which seems another parallel to the early internet on which people posted content from traditional media but the media didn't at first broadcast content originating on the web. Anyways, all this is to say: don't let yourself get blindsided by a new paradigm while you're resting on the laurels of the last revolution.
nelsonic 3y ago
Nope. FB ("Meta") are shoveling cash onto a bonfire and will not reap the benefits because a competitor that people trust will beat them to produtc-market-fit long before they recoup their "investment".
- usrusr 3y ago
  Yeah, but if you buy into the first mover advantage assumption that might well be too late. He who invented the virtual sword fighting algorithms shall never be defeated and all that. They could also just pretend to buy into the first mover assumption, if a large enough fraction of the stock market does, that will be good enough.
  - nelsonic 3y ago
    I know you're playing devil's advocate but at this point it's just sunk-cost bias ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost#Fallacy_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost#Fallacy_effect Yes, I agree that that the AI-generated virtual worlds are getting better each day, but Mark & Co are making a pretty massive assumption that people (a) want to spend large amounts of time in a virtual world and (b) his virtual world. We'll see very soon from the uptake of the Apple Vision Pro how many people want that (virtual) reality. ;-)
CPLX 3y ago
There's no metaverse. There's not going to be a metaverse. Nobody wants a metaverse.
- throwaway4aday 3y ago
  I want a metaverse, speak for yourself
corimaith 3y ago
The institutional knowledge and skills from building a mature VR gaming landscape could arguably be used as a stepping stone to their "metaverse" though.
xorcist 3y ago
The strategy to not care about gaming today because it won't be dominant in the future is hard to understand. Given that we will spend all our days in VR in 10 years or so, who will own that space? The company that designs future products today and only needs to sit on it for a decade until the technology and human society have caught up? Or the company that goes all in on VR gaming, a technology that exists today, and completely owns that space until the technology is mature enough to branch out beyond gaming?
- cedilla 3y ago
  "Given that"? Is there any reason to assume that VR will be anything other than a niche of a niche in rich countries in such a short time frame?
  - Philpax 3y ago
    I think they were presenting that as a conditional, not as a sure-fire bet. With that, though: the access to the technology is getting cheaper and cheaper, thanks to no small amount by Meta's subsidies [0]. If it does take a pivotal role in our technological future (which I believe it will, but I'm not expecting you to), I would imagine it'd end up being like the smartphone: many vendors will sprout up and drive costs down, especially for low-income markets. [0]: https://www.androidcentral.com/gaming/virtual-reality/meta-quest-lite https://www.androidcentral.com/gaming/virtual-reality/meta-q...
kranke155 3y ago
The Meta verse is an impossible dream. Thinking a single company will own it is like thinking a single company could own multiplayer gaming, cloud documents, and remote work. It’s an impossible, absurdist maximalist goal that I don’t see how any company could fully deliver on. Hardware is just hardware. Apple builds hardware that then becomes an ecosystem. Reality Labs was trying to build the hardware AND the ecosystem AND the apps. This on top of an unworkable concept for Human Computer Interaction - Virtual Reality - which consumers have already rejected over and over again. There will be no consumer market VR headset because the concept is fundamentally alienating. I suspect there are a lot of people on the spectrum in IT who seem convinced that somehow this is a tech problem. IT IS NOT, nor will it ever be. Getting in a VR headset and being in a reality where no one else is ever there, nor will they ever be (in the next 10-20 years, there is no tech that reliably emulates full body capture, not to mention touch and smell, two key parts of the human experience) is fundamentally unpleasant for the general public, because the general public, quite correctly, places a very high level of reward to being around other people, co regulating emotions, reading body language, and kissing and having sex. Since none of that is mapped into VR, the concept of a general use VR OS with a consumer market is fundamentally dystopian and perhaps even physiologically and psychologically unsafe. Having said that - I have worked in VR since 2014 and anyone in their right mind will tell you that Reality Labs was a dumb idea. There is not, and there won’t be for a very long time, any mass consumer market for VR (billions of units) because VR is anti human, anti connective and is most likely bad for people if they use it for long hours.
- minton 3y ago
  I think VR can enable human connection where it otherwise isn’t possible due to distance. Of course, it isn’t a full substitute for in-person interaction, but it doesn’t have to be either or. We can have a great remote connection via VR and still exist in the real world. Check out this podcast[0] between Lex Fridman and Mark Zuckerberg where they meet remotely via the metaverse. [0] https://youtu.be/MVYrJJNdrEg https://youtu.be/MVYrJJNdrEg
  - kranke155 3y ago
    I don’t know that many people who would prefer this to a Zoom call. Plus this is not full body scanning, it requires you (again) to lose all perception of the real world (zoom doesn’t) and even the scanning that was used for this call requires a full body scanning room which you know, no one is going to have. Both Lex and Zuck went through a significant scanning process to get this level of fidelity. Plus again there is no reason whatsoever to do this in a VR environment vs an AR environment using the Apple Vision Pro (which is a real product that has potential, since it’s not VR).
rchaud 3y ago
This comment reads like it came from 2021 when Carmack was still there and it maybe looked like they were serious about it. Absolutely nobody is interested in VR anything from FB as long as Zuck is the pitchman.

tonmoy 3y ago

I feel Quest is so well priced because Meta is probably losing money trying get consumers to buy them

FirmwareBurner 3y ago
That's what all console makers did to gain market share though. Sell cheap HW on the loss, then make it back on games sales. And VR tech is still expensive and not commoditized yet like consoles which are now just PCs.
- bigtex 3y ago
  Not true. Nintendo historically made profit on every game system that came out, which explains their use of older, cheaper technology. I don’t know if this is true for the Switch though.
  - nscalf 3y ago
    Nintendo also makes notoriously bad consoles (by spec, not uniqueness). Their IP is more of the reason they succeed than is the case for most consoles. Their hardware is always years behind the specs for competitors.
    - Gigachad 3y ago
      We have long since reached the point where top tier specs don’t matter that much. Gameplay isn’t being held back by the hardware anymore.
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    Old and cheap technology like Nintendo uses doesn't work to sell VR. You gotta be at leaser somewhat cutting edge. Plus Nintendo has several failures, the Virtualboy, the Gamecube, WiiU.
  - wk_end 3y ago
    Definitely true of the Switch. I’m not sure if it’s true of their older hardware, though - the FC, SFC, N64 and GC were all fairly advanced for their times and still modestly priced at launch. The N64 in particular was a pile of high-end custom silicon - if they weren’t selling at a loss, they were getting one hell of a sweetheart deal from SGI and Rambus. My understanding is that the “old technology” approach guided their portable lineup more than anything, and only started to be adopted by their mainline consoles as they started to struggle there and felt they needed a different approach from Sony/MS to compete.

paulddraper 3y ago

> mandating Facebook accounts FWIW, that was only ever a requirement for Occulus Quest, and they removed the requirement over a year ago.

IggleSniggle 3y ago
FWIW, they told me I would lose my entire Oculus library if I didn't change from a simple Oculus email login to a Meta account and all that entails (I'm a CV1 owner). Threatening the loss of a few hundred dollars of software unless I gave up my privacy definitely left a sour taste in my mouth. I didn't even care about the Quest, they just decided I wasn't going to be able to use my software anymore.
- paulddraper 3y ago
  Yeah, I think they were planning on doing that at one time.
juliangoldsmith 3y ago
Is the headset usable without any kind of account? A quick search suggested you'd still need a Meta account of some kind (allegedly separate from a Facebook account).

napo 3y ago

I heartily agree with you, but on this point: > and they have some cracking games that get you hooked My main issue with VR is that I only got hooked to Beat Saber. There are some other titles that I quite liked (I expect you to die, demeo), but they never had other games, to the level of Beat Saber, for me to be really excited with the platform.

FirmwareBurner 3y ago
>My main issue with VR is that I only got hooked to Beat Saber. But that's subjective, no? I personally never got hooked on Beat Saber but instead on 'In Death Unchained'. Like I said, the main problem is marketing. There are great games and experiences out there but probably few know them because there's no hype around them the way there is for Cyberpunk, GTA, CoD and other mainstream AAA franchises that drive insane amounts of money just form preorders of buggy games.
- dsgnr 3y ago
  Seems more objective to me in that the quest has shitty software beyond one or two games. One or two games wont carry a platform very long regardless of marketing. Shitty software hurts the hardware most.
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    >Seems more objective to me in that the quest has shitty software beyond one or two games. "Yeah, well you know, that's just like, your opinion, man."

ivanb 3y ago

AR is for seeing what the customer is seeing and feeding customized ads and specialized offers. It is the ability to show smaller prices to poor and bigger prices to wealthy, increasing margins. It is an invaluable tool for marketers. It is potentially big big money for Facebook but meager offering for customers. VR is for luring users into AR advertising dystopia. Metaverse is a masquerade. Too bad for them they spent so much on the 3D red herring.

PaulHoule 3y ago

I just got a Meta Quest 3 and boy am I blown away. I've been working on a long term art project where I make things like https://mastodon.social/@UP8/111219354336635872 https://mastodon.social/@UP8/111219354336635872 and https://mastodon.social/@UP8/110721329572538223 https://mastodon.social/@UP8/110721329572538223 you don't see it in those photos but when those things are done they get a barcode that lets you "flip over" the cards. I started developing them a few months before Zuckerberg announced the metaverse and felt in many ways my work was related. (e.g. I can go to a conference and pass out 20 cent glasses to the audience so they can view my 3-d images) I've known for a long time that the cards were going to have an MR component the same way the real numbers have the imaginary numbers, it was a matter of time. That time has come. There is a demo for the Quest 3 where your room gets invaded by little aliens and you have to shoot them to catch them and stuff them in a container. Chunks of your wall and ceiling fall away and you can see out to an alien world outside. It's just amazing. I am showing the demo to as many friends and family as I can so I can get good at presenting it and then I am going to show it to museum directors and similar people because I really want to sell something like that to somebody like that. It's now possible to make something like a theme park experience at a dramatically lower cost. If the technology becomes really mainstream there will be a limited window that this can be sold as something place-based but if it is slow to take off that window is longer. The Quest 3 has gotten about 1% of the excitement that Apple Vision has but it is here and now and I think fully realized. I think also Meta has learned from many of its marketing mistakes because Zuckeberg wants to win that one. To confront the "people play with it then abandon it" they are providing a license to a game that comes out in a month. I think you'll never see another creepy Zuckerberg avatar. People are so burned out on Meta that the story has been almost buried but I think a lot of people are going to try a Quest 3 and become a believer.

MilStdJunkie 3y ago

The "social media" requirement with AR also sent us reeling in mil-spec-landia, where every little widget HAS to be insulated - or at least insulate-able - from wide area networks, and anything that needs a cloud to run is DOA. Sure, I guess you can configure an image on GovCloud or one of the other ITAR cloud services but . . have you ever tried to deploy a consumer app image on a NIST-and-FEDRAMP-and-WHATEVERELSE-certified container? There's a reason the big vendors just give up and run on-prem. You end up with a whole other release of your software that you get to maintain, forever. Maybe this has gotten better in the last few years . .