Submitted 3 months ago by jeffw@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
https://gizmodo.com/meta-reportedly-unhappy-with-how-much-money-its-vr-division-burns-2000476495
You could have, you know, not bought and ruined oculus, and destroyed the VR ecosystem.
I was at GDC the year of the acquisition. There were Facebook suits walking around the showroom floor writing checks to sign exclusivity deals with anyone showing off a VR game.
That is a way more legit reason to still be mad, in my book, and it predates the Facebook acquisition. Oculus had made all that noise about how their devices would be platform agnostic and they wouldn't try to railroad you into buying games through their platform and the moment there was money buzz around the idea Luckey dropped that stuff like it was red hot and we ended up with the travesty that is the PC Oculus store.
I don't think VR was ever going to be mainstream, but imagine what the software ecosystem would be if tecbro Smeagol hadn't gotten greedy for that precious, precious investment money.
At least we have some pretty amazing hardware with a decent variety to choose from.
Yeah, I wish more quality content was made for VR, but it’s still pretty mind blowing even with what we have.
Facebook flooded the market with cash, but failed to secure any Killer App to get people on their product. I wouldn’t say they ruined Oculus so much as it continues to be an unsolved technology that wasn’t ready for this level of exposure. I still can’t use the damned thing for more than an hour without feeling nauseous, and Meta was trying to gear up Oculus headsets for mass adoption by office workers.
The games market isn’t what they’re fixated on. They want this to be standard hardware for excel-book jockeys.
Truly a solution looking for a problem.
I suspect that we’ll end up not with the gaming market being where this sticks, but entertainment. Imagine an immersive movie with 360 views.
[Publicly traded company] unhappy with how much money [division] burns. Suggests putting the money into stock buybacks.
Wow, this is some hard- hitting journalism that couldn’t possibly write itself!
Even the buybacks are getting crazy when the P/E of these firms is on the order of 30-50. The big financial institutions just assumes these big companies have the growth potential of tiny startups and that they will forever and ever and ever.
Atm, Meta’s actually looking not-terrible with its 27 P/E ratio and $40B/year advertising income stream. So they’ve got plenty of room to fuck around and find out with VR and AI. But eventually, the fact that nobody is advertising on this shit (because nobody is using it) means they have to explain why they’re sinking hundreds of millions into a dead end.
That’ll force them to pivot to some other speculative source of infinite growth. Which will reignite the hype cycle for the Next Big Thing. But, in the end, its the steady monopolization of ad dollars in their existing franchise markets that they care about.
Incidentally, also why they need to shut TikTok down before it eats into their market share even further.
90% of technology companies quit before making a hit VR product. We should encourage Meta to spend more.
Well, if I didn’t have to make a face book log in to use one. If not for that I would consider one to play in steam. Even if I had to have it tethered.
Same sentiment except additionally I will never buy anything from Facebook because they are radicalizing people.
Not going to buy an Apple Vision either if it won’t behave as a generic screen for any OS.
I am utterly sick of the account requirement and proprietary connector bullshit from every company.
That wouldn't be better for the company. They probably don't make money on selling the hardware.
I think they don’t require that anymore. It’s a “Meta login” which can be separate from Facebook. At least for Quest devices.
Call it what you want, but this requirement prevents me from buying their products too. I use no Meta services. Don’t wanna start.
do you struggle to play peekaboo? how do you not grasp that they’re feeding into the same software ecosystem and your data is being stored in the same database?
Not separated enough for me. I know all the big companies are bad, but I won’t touch google/fb hardware.
The same jerks with a new name get the all your data. Bootlick harder.
I am still so incredibly salty that my quest 1 is a paperweight because of this requirement.
It did not exist when I purchased the product. Full Stop.
When they introduced to that requirement with the quest 2 you were able to use the quest one without it with no issue. Sometime last year we tried to hook our quest one up to Steam Link and were met with a Meta Account requirement. There was no way within the UI to get around it.
In a moment of frustration, wanting to play some Beat Saber with the family, I went ahead and started the process of making a meta account only to be stopped several times along the way by various privacy layers on our network. It was insane. My PiHole about caught fire.
30 minutes in I gave up and dug out the Vive Cosmos and all 20 wires it needed. So disappointed meta is the only wireless headse with decent battery life. They ruined VR adoption for me.
meta: makes vr division
also meta: is shocked it bleeds money
keep in mind meta didnt make occulus, they bought it out. Oculus is just on the list of silicon valley startups that suceeded in getting bought out and profited from. (of the 10x more that fail)
Is this supposed to be better somehow? Pesonally it doesn’t make much difference to me if Meta created their own shitty VR or bought a decent VR then made it shitty… The result is the same.
They didn’t make shit. They did what Google loves to do and they bought a highly successful, incredibly progressive company. And now it’s shit, just like alllll the others that got bought out by big names.
Good. Learning Facebook bought Oculus was fucking depressing as shit.
What they’ve done to it since has been worse than what most (if not all) of us expected.
Oculus was created by Palmer Lucky.
Palmer Lucky’s new company is making drones for the military.
Nothing of value was lost.
Add a new VR headset to that list. Since the FTC has done away with non compete clauses the man went ahead and announced he will show off his new headset this August (I think it has a a military focus as well). So many VR influencers were salivatimg in the comments of his post.
I find it frustrating that people give this man credit for jumpstarting VR when if he hadn’t Sony probably would have. They were expetimenting with VERY similar tech around the time he was.
If anything we should attribute luckey to the contamination of the industry. If it wasn’t for his choice to sell to facebook the landscape might have been a little bit greener. Most definitely more growing pains for the tech but I do think we would have seen more open hardware. Hell, maybe Valve would have found it necessary to pick up the reigns. It’s been said the Deckard may not release because they don’t find it necessary with steam link on quest. (Not confirmed obviously).
Fuck anduril.
Damn. Sorry to feel about that emotion a soulless corporation is having.
It felt better when VR was the hot new buzzword, right? Oh well, there’s the AI division also burning money, but at least it’s the current buzzword!
“meta unhappy” good…
VR is over rated as fuck. It will never be mainstream. It’s a fad that will disappear
Part of me agrees and part of me doesn’t.
I don’t know a kid who doesn’t have at least a Quest 2. I have four brother in laws aged 11-16 and every time I go over there at least two of them are in the basement rocking the headset. My neighbor is on his every day. My daughter has the Quest 2, full body trackers, and a beefy gaming PC almost exclusively dedicated to VR. The kids are all in, seriously.
I’m 38. I have a Quest 2 but I also have two toddlers and an infant (in a couple weeks anyway). I haven’t turned my Quest on in about a year. I got pretty heavy into Pavlov for a while, but here’s where the failure comes in for VR being mainstream and widely adopted. I can’t play and watch my children. I have to ask my wife to take on all of the responsibility just so I can play, and I don’t feel good about that so I just don’t play.
It isn’t the same as something like a Steam Deck. I can put it down and get back into it easily while also keeping an eye on the world around me. I can put my kids on my lap and they can watch me play if they want to. You just can’t do that in VR. It completely disengages you from your surroundings. It isn’t easy to jump in and out of it because you have to be trapped to a dedicated space with your eyes turned off to the world.
I love VR, but not enough to pull myself entirely out of my life to play. I think most people face that issue.
It’s a nonissue when you’re a teenager on summer break with no responsibilities. There’s just no room in a busy life for VR.
I’d like to see it succeed. I’d like to see it come to a point where you can somehow keep your real space visible, if only on a monitor in the corner of a high res display. I love it, I just can’t use it.
My 6 year old has never played or seen a video game.
I take her to the beach, playdates at the park with friends, we go mountain biking, etc. Hearing your stories makes my flesh crawl
VR is just 3D goggles. So yes it’s overrated but I don’t see any tech reason why it couldn’t be mainstream.
It requires its users to wear special equipment and the mainstream doesn’t want that. 3D Blu Ray died for the same reason. The only company that cracked the mainstream with anything remotely in that direction was Nintendo with its 3DS.
But the worst part is how they affect me personally. With my big glasses 🤓 I am no longer allowed at places of personal interest such as science and engineering events, nudist beaches, orgies at friends houses and gangbang dates.
u/Chemical_Cutthroat Reportedly Happy With How Much Money Meta’s VR Division Burns
Iheartcheese@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Maybe you shouldn’t have made it so shit
ByteOnBikes@slrpnk.net 3 months ago
Listen pal - Do you know how hard it is to make legs for a wii-like avatar?! We need another 8 billion.
barsquid@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Hello, I am a friendly ghost coming to attend your serious business meeting in the Metaverse. Did you know that this is going to be a massive industry? Buy your Metaverse real estate now, it’s definitely not a fake digital asset that Facebook can create and delete at will.
KoboldCoterie@pawb.social 3 months ago
Cutting spending by 20% while not reducing output will definitely accomplish that, too!
Reverendender@sh.itjust.works 3 months ago