7 ms·

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 advertisi

by 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.

by soared 3y ago

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.