8 ms·

I wonder if this "opening" of the operating system is their way of putting the metaverse project out to pasture - analogous to donating it to the Apache Foundat

by crmd 2y ago

I wonder if this "opening" of the operating system is their way of putting the metaverse project out to pasture - analogous to donating it to the Apache Foundation - without admitting that the company burned $36 billion on a misadventure.

romanhn 2y ago
I'm guessing it's the opposite. Meta is trying to establish the same OS-level foothold/control that Microsoft, Apple and Google have.
- nicce 2y ago
  Is there better place to place ads than Metaverse ;)
  - exe34 2y ago
    It's great isn't it! All ads should go there. In fact ads should be banned everywhere else!
- bevekspldnw 2y ago
  Exactly, at the root a lot of this about ATT.
- AzzyHN 2y ago
  Having a personal computer at home was a game-changer, though. "The Metaverse" has been around for a couple years now, and yet consumer VR (which has been around for eight years now) is still just a "gimmick", rather than a must-have. The IBM Personal Computer released in 1981. By 1989... yeah. iPhone came out in 2007. By 2015, smartphones ruled the world.
  - rvba 2y ago
    IMHO when you talk about PCs "becoming the big thing" - it is more Windows 95 time. In 1989 market was still fragmented and PCs were weak (286, amiga, mac + old 8bits like atari and commodore).
  - throw310822 2y ago
    > iPhone came out in 2007. By 2015, smartphones ruled the world. Advanced phones with proper os, apps, camera had been around for years, and personal digital assistants before that. Tablets, too. iPhone got the form factor and ui exactly right and triggered an explosion, but it was far from the first. We might still be in the "smartphone, pre-iPhone" years.
    - crowcroft 2y ago
      I don't know what exactly is the right analogy for this, but two other points of context which make me discredit this line of thinking. 1. Feature/smart 'Phones' were around before the iPhone *and* were already pretty much ubiquitous. VR headsets don't do much but sit on shelfs (either in people's houses or in distribution centres not being sold). 2. VR has arguably existed in some ways before the Quest, Nintendo Virtual Boy was from the mid-90s. Maybe the iPhone comparison isn't right, but if we're decades into developing this technology and still very early in development I think we should assume we're a LONG way off these things becoming mainstream consumer devices and we should be wary of any company that brings them to the consumer market.
      - ricardobeat 2y ago
        > VR headsets don't do much but sit on shelfs (sic) Quest has 6+ million monthly active users. Steam 2-3 million. Sony doesn't publish numbers but a good guess is 3-4 million active players. If you allow for some overlap, that's roughly ten million monthly users, and in sales VR is already more successful than a lot of computer platforms of the past.
        herculity275 2y ago
        > Sony doesn't publish numbers but a good guess is 3-4 million active players. I find it really hard to believe that 3 million people put on PSVR2 every month. That thing gets basically no content.
        crowcroft 2y ago
        Yea it’s not nothing, but that’s a rounding error on the number of smartphone users.
  - mnahkies 2y ago
    Before the iPhone we had palm pilots, blackberries, etc. I prefer to think of it as consumer VR simply hasn't had its iPhone moment yet
    - baby 2y ago
      It’s crazy because if you try the Quest it’s quite insane how good it is already. If I were to guess what could give it an iPhone moment: - lighter/more comfortable - faster to get started when you put the headset on - more social experiences and event organized in VR - shorter time from headset on to hanging out with your friends in VR A number of years ago I convinced a bunch of my friends to buy the Quest after being blown away by board games in VR, but turns out Catan only worked for the Go and it was a lot of work to do something together in VR. IMO there needs to be some sort of lobby that does not take you away from hanging out with your friends when you’re in between games. I should be able to easily join a lobby or pause a game to go to a lobby and wave at my friend who’s playing to pause and join me in the lobby
      - jimmySixDOF 2y ago
        There is a nee version of Catan for Quest 2/3
        imzadi 2y ago
        There is, but it is kind of crappy. It's crossplay, but not in a meaningful way. You can't create a room and share a room code. The best you can do is invite a friend, but only if they are on the same platform. They've never done anything to improve it or make it more player friendly. They released it and forgot about it.
      - Capricorn2481 2y ago
        > - lighter/more comfortable It's this and one other point: Games that people aren't bored of in an hour. To me, very few games have come out for VR that don't feel like gimmicky experiences. Even Half Life Alyx, as advanced as it was, kinda felt like a theme park ride after a while. I'm not sure if there's technical reasons for it, but it feels like nobody is taking VR development seriously. It's hard to justify strapping a TV to my face and feeling uncomfortable for one-off experiences. Even if there was a game with some depth and replayability, I would be even more annoyed to play it on such an uncomfortable headset. Almost everyone I know is not using their VR headset anymore. I'm not sure it will ever move past that phase, because people want it to be smaller and, simultaneously, more technically immersive. So we're in some weird in between zone where it's neither.
  - TulliusCicero 2y ago
    VR headsets can be fun for some games, but the hardware and software still have a lot of maturing to do, it's not like smartphones where it feels very developed and there's not much more room for obvious growth/improvement.
    - MyFirstSass 2y ago
      Yesterday i was close to buying a Pico 4 (Cheaper non meta Quest 3 equivalent), then i realised there has been zero fully triple a games since my friend blew me away with a Half Life Alyx demo 4 years ago. I find it incredible there's still only 1 actual "serious" VR game - lots of people then recommended Skyrim VR, a game from 2011. Is VR gaming in an absolute standstill?
      - TulliusCicero 2y ago
        It's not at all, no. There's plenty of compelling games, there just aren't any AAA games (not ones built for VR only anyway) because the market simply isn't big enough to justify the incredible production costs. If you're dead set on only AAA games then yeah, it's not a useful purchase, but that doesn't mean it's "standing still".
      - jamilton 2y ago
        I think there are few to zero new AAA games, but I don't think that means VR gaming is at a standstill, or that there are no great, fun games.
      - numpad0 2y ago
        Yes. Meanwhile:[0] 0: https://medium.com/@nemchan_nel/vrchat-breaks-records-with-92-000-simultaneous-users-9464a33f3561 https://medium.com/@nemchan_nel/vrchat-breaks-records-with-9...
- babypuncher 2y ago
  The difference here though is I don't think AR/VR will ever become as ubiquitous for general purpose computing as laptops and smartphones.
- r00fus 2y ago
  It's both. Meta can be "giving it away" and "hoping to establish an OS foothold" but if there is no major interest in playing in this space, it's going to be a very empty metaverse.
soared 2y ago
Seems more aligned with trying to achieve what android is to mobile phones but with mixed reality.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- persolb 2y ago
  Exactly this. Facebook makes money by network effects. They are incentivized to grow network engagement, more than they are to make direct money off new network members.
- bee_rider 2y ago
  Which, I guess, makes sense. I think it is absolutely nuts that people would buy an OS developed by an ad company that relies on user profiling for their whole business. But then again it works for Google.
- PaulHoule 2y ago
  It actually is Android, just customized for XR.
  - justapassenger 2y ago
    [dead]
graypegg 2y ago
Using the name « horizon » without showing Horizon Worlds at all definitely hints at Horizon Worlds being a side social feature of the Horizon OS, versus this being an OS specifically FOR the horizon worlds metaverse. Meta/Facebook really has trouble with focus, I hope they can pick 1 vision for VR.
- vineyardmike 2y ago
  I think they have the most focus out of any big tech company. They have like 4 products. They’re trying to build a platform to build VR experiences on. That’s clearly their goal. Horizon Worlds is “just an app” to show that off. It’s a “hero use case”.
  - PaulHoule 2y ago
    I looked at it seriously for content authoring but gave it up. The big problem is you cannot import images, textures, 3-d models and such from ordinary tools. You have something like constructive solid geometry to work with but only so much and there is a slider you can use to set the number of players and the more players the less geometry you can use. I want to make worlds based on photographs (particularly pano and stereo) and art. McDonalds needs to put a Coca-Cola logo on the side of the cup. Either way it is a non-starter. HW supports collaboration (more than one person shares the world) but https://aframe.io/ https://aframe.io/ lets me make the content I want. If I have to choose one or the other I am going to pick the second. My take on Meta Quest is that it seems highly successful as a gaming environment based on an app store but is skews towards single-player experiences. Like a lot of AAA games, the excellent Asgard’s Wrath 2 has some multiplayer tacked on but it is all meaningless like leaderboards and the occasional ghost that shows up in a procedurally generated dungeon. Of course, Meta wants to make multiplayer experiences but somehow they just can’t do it.
    - pnw 2y ago
      The most popular gaming experiences on Quest are all social - Gorilla Tag, Rec Room, VR Chat, Population One, Contractors etc. It makes sense that expensive AAA experiences like Asgard's Wrath are single player since that's a fairly dominant model in gaming. The Quest doesn't have the player base to support a AAA multiplayer model at this point.
rbanffy 2y ago
Not really. There is no money in VR/AR headsets. All the money is in the services that back them. Even further, the less money is in making headsets, the more money is in the services. To say nothing about your data, which is Facebook's primary revenue driver.
swatcoder 2y ago
It reads more like they're smartly stepping away from the hardware game they're not really optimized for and focusing on the software and connectivity features that they are. I'm not keen on more headsets having a Meta data vacuum built-in, but this isn't the opposite of putting the metaverse stuff to pasture. They're just shifting from an Apple strategy of full-control vertical integration to a Android/Windows strategy of platform ubiquity.
- sgift 2y ago
  > It reads more like they're smartly stepping away from the hardware game they're not really optimized for and focusing on the software and connectivity features that they are. Which would be weird cause the hardware (Quest 3/Quest Pro) is top notch, while Metas software for it is garbage. Everything good is provided by 3rd party companies.
  - swatcoder 2y ago
    Pixel phones are great too, but Google would be a radically different company if they tried to saturate the demand for Android hardware on their own. Making flagship/reference hardware on the Oculus legacy is a much better strategy for Meta and lets them focus on platform vision and data collection, which is exactly the company they spent the last 15+ years building.
  - baby 2y ago
    I really hope Meta keeps making hardware. I want a Quest 4
    - sgift 2y ago
      Yeah, me too. It would be really sad if Meta stopped hardware development and left it to other companies.
  - andybak 2y ago
    "Garbage" is harsh. It's flawed but they are streets ahead of Pico or Vive. Ironically Google Daydream was also very polished and now Google is starting again but with a gigantic dent in their credibility.
vineyardmike 2y ago
1. Zuck always wanted to own a platform. He was a developer at heart and wants a product that developers can build on. He’s personally invested in this. 2. I’m pretty sure a lot of the cost quoted for their “Metaverse” stuff included their CapEx for a ton of GPUs which probably have a lot of other uses within the company.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  I wonder how 1. works. Won't any developer tell you that platforms are traps, to be avoided unless necessary (or unless you're prepared in advance to jump off it at any time)? I feel platforms are only interesting to business folks, particularly those selling access to them.
  - vineyardmike 2y ago
    Platforms are a trap, except Windows launched a revolution. Platforms are a trap, but iOS made companies (like Facebook) billions.
    - beachy 2y ago
      Animals usually realise there is something off about a trap. They interact with it extremely cautiously, sometimes leaving it for a few nights and then coming back. Eventually their desire for whats in the trap overcomes their caution and they put their head in.
- zem 2y ago
  as a developer at heart he should have thought back to how interested he would have been in sharecropping on someone else's locked down platform!
- TiredOfLife 2y ago
  Meta reality does a TON of research.
burnte 2y ago
This is them doing that but also trying to do what Android did, capture the bulk of the market and leave the ultra-ridiculously-high-end to Apple.
- criddell 2y ago
  So create a big market where nobody makes much money to compete with Apple's smaller market that captures absurd margins?
  - b112 2y ago
    Do devs really capture absurd margins? Or does Apple, leaving the dev with a pittance?
    - criddell 2y ago
      I thought ultra-ridiculously-high-end was referring mostly to Apple hardware and bundled software.
      - burnte 2y ago
        I mostly meant when Apple goes crazy like Vision Pro being $3500, Mac Studio and Mac Pro prices, etc. Those are low-volume items and I think Vision Pro will be relegated to that niche too. If they cut a lot of useless fluff like the eyeball cams/screens, and focus on fit/price they can have a good V2. But the "spatial computing" thing was dead on arrival, it'll never take off as it hasn't taken off in 40 years. People don't want to wave their arms in the air all day.
    - awad 2y ago
      While we can debate plenty on what the right amount of App Store fees might be, it is objectively true that developers absolutely care about the market of available consumers on the high end platform.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
Culonavirus 2y ago
> the company burned $36 billion on a misadventure Watch out, the VR mafia is gonna get ya! Seriously though, any well informed and level headed person could see this coming a mile away. Apparently, such people are in short supply at Meta.
- wahnfrieden 2y ago
  The number of employees who can see failure coming does not matter when they are organized by hierarchy and coerced to work toward failure under threat of losing their wage.
  - bsimpson 2y ago
    Plenty of people inside Google also thought that splitting(/replacing) Hangouts into Allo and Duo was monumentally stupid.
    - smm11 2y ago
      That was the thing that turned me off Google permanently. I deleted my G account and have never looked back.
- nradov 2y ago
  Meta kind of doesn't have a choice. The major platforms are now owned by Apple, Google, and Microsoft (and also to a lesser extent IBM and Amazon). The strategic risks of being dependent on other companies' platforms are huge. Meta is desperately hunting for a disruptive innovation that will allow them to control the next major platform. A lot of people are betting that will be AR/VR but it could be something completely different.
- imzadi 2y ago
  Speaking from the perspective of a person who is very into VR. There are a lot of things that have gone wrong. First, Facebook/Meta pushing hard with low-end hardware that caused the existing VR gaming to take leaps backward. PCVR was progressing fine before Zuckerberg intervened. Now the VR space is just cluttered with so many low effort, low res games. None of the big players want to get involved, because everyone is so convinced it is too "niche." Meanwhile, you have people who really want to spend money on VR and there's nothing worth spending the money on.
baby 2y ago
Why would they shut down the Metaverse? It’s clearly the future and Zuck brought it up again in the last podcast that people are linking to. Apple just release a bad headset that just confirmed the bet that Meta took
araes 2y ago
How does any company burn $36 billion on a headset they got handed a prototype for? At a reasonable $100k/yr and 50% overhead, that's 240,000 years of labor. ~5000 human lifetimes. At a .gov labor rate of 2080 hrs/yr, that's 500,000,000 hrs of work wasted? For mediocre "not a product rendering" that looks like 90's Second Life? I'm not usually the graphic resolution crowd, yet that was rather underwhelming. Could'a just taken a picture of the inside of the Quest view and it would have been better. Trying to avoid humble bragging, yet last year I put in four government proposals (one 20-pager, rest were 5-10), wrote a web app, converted a NIST matrix package to a different language, and wrote a mixed Android / Windows app for cross-communication. I may have observer bias, and not be representative. However, that was one year, not 5000 lifetimes... You'd think they would have more than a single game as their killer app. Not even Pokemon Go or similar? It's such an obvious previous idea.
- azinman2 2y ago
  100k/yr is not reasonable for Bay Area, let alone top talent. There are people working on it making $1M/yr+. Junior developers straight out of college are making more at Meta. You're also assuming everything went to just engineering payroll, which is obviously not true.
  - araes 2y ago
    Then FB/Meta's throwing money out the door on people who demonstrably do not deserve $1M+/yr. And on that topic, same with Wikipedia, why "must" you have your development base in the most expensive place on the West Coast? Per https://www.gamedevmap.com/ https://www.gamedevmap.com/ there are Many other, less expensive, locations. America has a bunch, even Africa has gamedevs. They're an International megacorp, with 3 billion monthly active user (probably still a lot of dupes). India has the largest FB audience (366 million, 2024), not America (100 million). Will an Indian developer make you a launch app for less than $1M+/yr? New Dehli has 17 game studios (including Riot Games) and Mumbai has 33 (Ubisoft Mumbai and Pune).
    - danielmarkbruce 2y ago
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
drdaeman 2y ago
"Opening" what? I can't think of anything here that even remotely resembles opening something to a public or donating a project to any foundation. They realized they have an asset, and they made some money by licensing it. Sales department did their job, story at 11. But it would've been a boring non-story, so a copywriter used the corporate brandbook - and "open" is the buzzword of the last few years when it comes to the technology. Someone need to make an LLM SaaS to de-bulshittify the news.
mvkel 2y ago
Agreed. Zuck on Dwarkesh's podcast definitely seemed to be doing some aggressive retconning, making it seem like AI was always the plan, and the metaverse never was. Of course the opposite was true.

by crmd 2y ago

romanhn 2y ago

I'm guessing it's the opposite. Meta is trying to establish the same OS-level foothold/control that Microsoft, Apple and Google have.

nicce 2y ago
Is there better place to place ads than Metaverse ;)
- exe34 2y ago
  It's great isn't it! All ads should go there. In fact ads should be banned everywhere else!
bevekspldnw 2y ago
Exactly, at the root a lot of this about ATT.
AzzyHN 2y ago
Having a personal computer at home was a game-changer, though. "The Metaverse" has been around for a couple years now, and yet consumer VR (which has been around for eight years now) is still just a "gimmick", rather than a must-have. The IBM Personal Computer released in 1981. By 1989... yeah. iPhone came out in 2007. By 2015, smartphones ruled the world.
- rvba 2y ago
  IMHO when you talk about PCs "becoming the big thing" - it is more Windows 95 time. In 1989 market was still fragmented and PCs were weak (286, amiga, mac + old 8bits like atari and commodore).
- throw310822 2y ago
  > iPhone came out in 2007. By 2015, smartphones ruled the world. Advanced phones with proper os, apps, camera had been around for years, and personal digital assistants before that. Tablets, too. iPhone got the form factor and ui exactly right and triggered an explosion, but it was far from the first. We might still be in the "smartphone, pre-iPhone" years.
  - crowcroft 2y ago
    I don't know what exactly is the right analogy for this, but two other points of context which make me discredit this line of thinking. 1. Feature/smart 'Phones' were around before the iPhone *and* were already pretty much ubiquitous. VR headsets don't do much but sit on shelfs (either in people's houses or in distribution centres not being sold). 2. VR has arguably existed in some ways before the Quest, Nintendo Virtual Boy was from the mid-90s. Maybe the iPhone comparison isn't right, but if we're decades into developing this technology and still very early in development I think we should assume we're a LONG way off these things becoming mainstream consumer devices and we should be wary of any company that brings them to the consumer market.
    - ricardobeat 2y ago
      > VR headsets don't do much but sit on shelfs (sic) Quest has 6+ million monthly active users. Steam 2-3 million. Sony doesn't publish numbers but a good guess is 3-4 million active players. If you allow for some overlap, that's roughly ten million monthly users, and in sales VR is already more successful than a lot of computer platforms of the past.
      - herculity275 2y ago
        > Sony doesn't publish numbers but a good guess is 3-4 million active players. I find it really hard to believe that 3 million people put on PSVR2 every month. That thing gets basically no content.
      - crowcroft 2y ago
        Yea it’s not nothing, but that’s a rounding error on the number of smartphone users.
- mnahkies 2y ago
  Before the iPhone we had palm pilots, blackberries, etc. I prefer to think of it as consumer VR simply hasn't had its iPhone moment yet
  - baby 2y ago
    It’s crazy because if you try the Quest it’s quite insane how good it is already. If I were to guess what could give it an iPhone moment: - lighter/more comfortable - faster to get started when you put the headset on - more social experiences and event organized in VR - shorter time from headset on to hanging out with your friends in VR A number of years ago I convinced a bunch of my friends to buy the Quest after being blown away by board games in VR, but turns out Catan only worked for the Go and it was a lot of work to do something together in VR. IMO there needs to be some sort of lobby that does not take you away from hanging out with your friends when you’re in between games. I should be able to easily join a lobby or pause a game to go to a lobby and wave at my friend who’s playing to pause and join me in the lobby
    - jimmySixDOF 2y ago
      There is a nee version of Catan for Quest 2/3
      - imzadi 2y ago
        There is, but it is kind of crappy. It's crossplay, but not in a meaningful way. You can't create a room and share a room code. The best you can do is invite a friend, but only if they are on the same platform. They've never done anything to improve it or make it more player friendly. They released it and forgot about it.
    - Capricorn2481 2y ago
      > - lighter/more comfortable It's this and one other point: Games that people aren't bored of in an hour. To me, very few games have come out for VR that don't feel like gimmicky experiences. Even Half Life Alyx, as advanced as it was, kinda felt like a theme park ride after a while. I'm not sure if there's technical reasons for it, but it feels like nobody is taking VR development seriously. It's hard to justify strapping a TV to my face and feeling uncomfortable for one-off experiences. Even if there was a game with some depth and replayability, I would be even more annoyed to play it on such an uncomfortable headset. Almost everyone I know is not using their VR headset anymore. I'm not sure it will ever move past that phase, because people want it to be smaller and, simultaneously, more technically immersive. So we're in some weird in between zone where it's neither.
- TulliusCicero 2y ago
  VR headsets can be fun for some games, but the hardware and software still have a lot of maturing to do, it's not like smartphones where it feels very developed and there's not much more room for obvious growth/improvement.
  - MyFirstSass 2y ago
    Yesterday i was close to buying a Pico 4 (Cheaper non meta Quest 3 equivalent), then i realised there has been zero fully triple a games since my friend blew me away with a Half Life Alyx demo 4 years ago. I find it incredible there's still only 1 actual "serious" VR game - lots of people then recommended Skyrim VR, a game from 2011. Is VR gaming in an absolute standstill?
    - TulliusCicero 2y ago
      It's not at all, no. There's plenty of compelling games, there just aren't any AAA games (not ones built for VR only anyway) because the market simply isn't big enough to justify the incredible production costs. If you're dead set on only AAA games then yeah, it's not a useful purchase, but that doesn't mean it's "standing still".
    - jamilton 2y ago
      I think there are few to zero new AAA games, but I don't think that means VR gaming is at a standstill, or that there are no great, fun games.
    - numpad0 2y ago
      Yes. Meanwhile:[0] 0: https://medium.com/@nemchan_nel/vrchat-breaks-records-with-92-000-simultaneous-users-9464a33f3561 https://medium.com/@nemchan_nel/vrchat-breaks-records-with-9...
babypuncher 2y ago
The difference here though is I don't think AR/VR will ever become as ubiquitous for general purpose computing as laptops and smartphones.
r00fus 2y ago
It's both. Meta can be "giving it away" and "hoping to establish an OS foothold" but if there is no major interest in playing in this space, it's going to be a very empty metaverse.

soared 2y ago

Seems more aligned with trying to achieve what android is to mobile phones but with mixed reality.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
persolb 2y ago
Exactly this. Facebook makes money by network effects. They are incentivized to grow network engagement, more than they are to make direct money off new network members.
bee_rider 2y ago
Which, I guess, makes sense. I think it is absolutely nuts that people would buy an OS developed by an ad company that relies on user profiling for their whole business. But then again it works for Google.
PaulHoule 2y ago
It actually is Android, just customized for XR.
- justapassenger 2y ago
  [dead]

graypegg 2y ago

Using the name « horizon » without showing Horizon Worlds at all definitely hints at Horizon Worlds being a side social feature of the Horizon OS, versus this being an OS specifically FOR the horizon worlds metaverse. Meta/Facebook really has trouble with focus, I hope they can pick 1 vision for VR.

vineyardmike 2y ago
I think they have the most focus out of any big tech company. They have like 4 products. They’re trying to build a platform to build VR experiences on. That’s clearly their goal. Horizon Worlds is “just an app” to show that off. It’s a “hero use case”.
- PaulHoule 2y ago
  I looked at it seriously for content authoring but gave it up. The big problem is you cannot import images, textures, 3-d models and such from ordinary tools. You have something like constructive solid geometry to work with but only so much and there is a slider you can use to set the number of players and the more players the less geometry you can use. I want to make worlds based on photographs (particularly pano and stereo) and art. McDonalds needs to put a Coca-Cola logo on the side of the cup. Either way it is a non-starter. HW supports collaboration (more than one person shares the world) but https://aframe.io/ https://aframe.io/ lets me make the content I want. If I have to choose one or the other I am going to pick the second. My take on Meta Quest is that it seems highly successful as a gaming environment based on an app store but is skews towards single-player experiences. Like a lot of AAA games, the excellent Asgard’s Wrath 2 has some multiplayer tacked on but it is all meaningless like leaderboards and the occasional ghost that shows up in a procedurally generated dungeon. Of course, Meta wants to make multiplayer experiences but somehow they just can’t do it.
  - pnw 2y ago
    The most popular gaming experiences on Quest are all social - Gorilla Tag, Rec Room, VR Chat, Population One, Contractors etc. It makes sense that expensive AAA experiences like Asgard's Wrath are single player since that's a fairly dominant model in gaming. The Quest doesn't have the player base to support a AAA multiplayer model at this point.

rbanffy 2y ago

Not really. There is no money in VR/AR headsets. All the money is in the services that back them. Even further, the less money is in making headsets, the more money is in the services. To say nothing about your data, which is Facebook's primary revenue driver.

swatcoder 2y ago

It reads more like they're smartly stepping away from the hardware game they're not really optimized for and focusing on the software and connectivity features that they are. I'm not keen on more headsets having a Meta data vacuum built-in, but this isn't the opposite of putting the metaverse stuff to pasture. They're just shifting from an Apple strategy of full-control vertical integration to a Android/Windows strategy of platform ubiquity.

sgift 2y ago
> It reads more like they're smartly stepping away from the hardware game they're not really optimized for and focusing on the software and connectivity features that they are. Which would be weird cause the hardware (Quest 3/Quest Pro) is top notch, while Metas software for it is garbage. Everything good is provided by 3rd party companies.
- swatcoder 2y ago
  Pixel phones are great too, but Google would be a radically different company if they tried to saturate the demand for Android hardware on their own. Making flagship/reference hardware on the Oculus legacy is a much better strategy for Meta and lets them focus on platform vision and data collection, which is exactly the company they spent the last 15+ years building.
- baby 2y ago
  I really hope Meta keeps making hardware. I want a Quest 4
  - sgift 2y ago
    Yeah, me too. It would be really sad if Meta stopped hardware development and left it to other companies.
- andybak 2y ago
  "Garbage" is harsh. It's flawed but they are streets ahead of Pico or Vive. Ironically Google Daydream was also very polished and now Google is starting again but with a gigantic dent in their credibility.

vineyardmike 2y ago

1. Zuck always wanted to own a platform. He was a developer at heart and wants a product that developers can build on. He’s personally invested in this. 2. I’m pretty sure a lot of the cost quoted for their “Metaverse” stuff included their CapEx for a ton of GPUs which probably have a lot of other uses within the company.

TeMPOraL 2y ago
I wonder how 1. works. Won't any developer tell you that platforms are traps, to be avoided unless necessary (or unless you're prepared in advance to jump off it at any time)? I feel platforms are only interesting to business folks, particularly those selling access to them.
- vineyardmike 2y ago
  Platforms are a trap, except Windows launched a revolution. Platforms are a trap, but iOS made companies (like Facebook) billions.
  - beachy 2y ago
    Animals usually realise there is something off about a trap. They interact with it extremely cautiously, sometimes leaving it for a few nights and then coming back. Eventually their desire for whats in the trap overcomes their caution and they put their head in.
zem 2y ago
as a developer at heart he should have thought back to how interested he would have been in sharecropping on someone else's locked down platform!
TiredOfLife 2y ago
Meta reality does a TON of research.

burnte 2y ago

This is them doing that but also trying to do what Android did, capture the bulk of the market and leave the ultra-ridiculously-high-end to Apple.

criddell 2y ago
So create a big market where nobody makes much money to compete with Apple's smaller market that captures absurd margins?
- b112 2y ago
  Do devs really capture absurd margins? Or does Apple, leaving the dev with a pittance?
  - criddell 2y ago
    I thought ultra-ridiculously-high-end was referring mostly to Apple hardware and bundled software.
    - burnte 2y ago
      I mostly meant when Apple goes crazy like Vision Pro being $3500, Mac Studio and Mac Pro prices, etc. Those are low-volume items and I think Vision Pro will be relegated to that niche too. If they cut a lot of useless fluff like the eyeball cams/screens, and focus on fit/price they can have a good V2. But the "spatial computing" thing was dead on arrival, it'll never take off as it hasn't taken off in 40 years. People don't want to wave their arms in the air all day.
  - awad 2y ago
    While we can debate plenty on what the right amount of App Store fees might be, it is objectively true that developers absolutely care about the market of available consumers on the high end platform.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

Culonavirus 2y ago

> the company burned $36 billion on a misadventure Watch out, the VR mafia is gonna get ya! Seriously though, any well informed and level headed person could see this coming a mile away. Apparently, such people are in short supply at Meta.

wahnfrieden 2y ago
The number of employees who can see failure coming does not matter when they are organized by hierarchy and coerced to work toward failure under threat of losing their wage.
- bsimpson 2y ago
  Plenty of people inside Google also thought that splitting(/replacing) Hangouts into Allo and Duo was monumentally stupid.
  - smm11 2y ago
    That was the thing that turned me off Google permanently. I deleted my G account and have never looked back.
nradov 2y ago
Meta kind of doesn't have a choice. The major platforms are now owned by Apple, Google, and Microsoft (and also to a lesser extent IBM and Amazon). The strategic risks of being dependent on other companies' platforms are huge. Meta is desperately hunting for a disruptive innovation that will allow them to control the next major platform. A lot of people are betting that will be AR/VR but it could be something completely different.
imzadi 2y ago
Speaking from the perspective of a person who is very into VR. There are a lot of things that have gone wrong. First, Facebook/Meta pushing hard with low-end hardware that caused the existing VR gaming to take leaps backward. PCVR was progressing fine before Zuckerberg intervened. Now the VR space is just cluttered with so many low effort, low res games. None of the big players want to get involved, because everyone is so convinced it is too "niche." Meanwhile, you have people who really want to spend money on VR and there's nothing worth spending the money on.

baby 2y ago

Why would they shut down the Metaverse? It’s clearly the future and Zuck brought it up again in the last podcast that people are linking to. Apple just release a bad headset that just confirmed the bet that Meta took

araes 2y ago

How does any company burn $36 billion on a headset they got handed a prototype for? At a reasonable $100k/yr and 50% overhead, that's 240,000 years of labor. ~5000 human lifetimes. At a .gov labor rate of 2080 hrs/yr, that's 500,000,000 hrs of work wasted? For mediocre "not a product rendering" that looks like 90's Second Life? I'm not usually the graphic resolution crowd, yet that was rather underwhelming. Could'a just taken a picture of the inside of the Quest view and it would have been better. Trying to avoid humble bragging, yet last year I put in four government proposals (one 20-pager, rest were 5-10), wrote a web app, converted a NIST matrix package to a different language, and wrote a mixed Android / Windows app for cross-communication. I may have observer bias, and not be representative. However, that was one year, not 5000 lifetimes... You'd think they would have more than a single game as their killer app. Not even Pokemon Go or similar? It's such an obvious previous idea.

azinman2 2y ago
100k/yr is not reasonable for Bay Area, let alone top talent. There are people working on it making $1M/yr+. Junior developers straight out of college are making more at Meta. You're also assuming everything went to just engineering payroll, which is obviously not true.
- araes 2y ago
  Then FB/Meta's throwing money out the door on people who demonstrably do not deserve $1M+/yr. And on that topic, same with Wikipedia, why "must" you have your development base in the most expensive place on the West Coast? Per https://www.gamedevmap.com/ https://www.gamedevmap.com/ there are Many other, less expensive, locations. America has a bunch, even Africa has gamedevs. They're an International megacorp, with 3 billion monthly active user (probably still a lot of dupes). India has the largest FB audience (366 million, 2024), not America (100 million). Will an Indian developer make you a launch app for less than $1M+/yr? New Dehli has 17 game studios (including Riot Games) and Mumbai has 33 (Ubisoft Mumbai and Pune).
  - danielmarkbruce 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

drdaeman 2y ago

"Opening" what? I can't think of anything here that even remotely resembles opening something to a public or donating a project to any foundation. They realized they have an asset, and they made some money by licensing it. Sales department did their job, story at 11. But it would've been a boring non-story, so a copywriter used the corporate brandbook - and "open" is the buzzword of the last few years when it comes to the technology. Someone need to make an LLM SaaS to de-bulshittify the news.

mvkel 2y ago

Agreed. Zuck on Dwarkesh's podcast definitely seemed to be doing some aggressive retconning, making it seem like AI was always the plan, and the metaverse never was. Of course the opposite was true.