Meta Reportedly Unhappy With How Much Money Its VR Division Burns
Meta Reportedly Unhappy With How Much Money Its VR Division Burns
Meta reportedly told its VR/AR teams to cut spending by a fifth, but the team is still expected to pump out Quest Headsets and AR glasses.
Maybe you shouldn't have made it so shit
Listen pal - Do you know how hard it is to make legs for a wii-like avatar?! We need another 8 billion.
They're called miis 😤
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.
Cutting spending by 20% while not reducing output will definitely accomplish that, too!
The tech in general just isn't good enough to do that much more. It's like having a coal powered steam engine and then saying you'll build a formula 1 car with it. They thought that with throwing enough money at the wall, a few breakthroughs in tech would fall out, but it doesn't work like that. If you're very lucky you hit one breakthrough, but they needed a few.
Sounds like the intial pitch probably went something like this, except they weren't realistic about the timeline.
Maybe you shouldn't have made it
so shit
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 techbro Smeagol hadn't gotten greedy for that precious, precious investment money.
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.
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.
That wouldn't be better for the company. They probably don't make money on selling the hardware.
Yeah, that's the entire deal of it. And why it's lame.
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.
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.
I think they don't require that anymore. It's a "Meta login" which can be separate from Facebook. At least for Quest devices.
Not separated enough for me. I know all the big companies are bad, but I won’t touch google/fb hardware.
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?
The same jerks with a new name get the all your data. Bootlick harder.
[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.
According to the report, the company’s chief financial officer, Susan Li, told staff the division has lost $55 billion since 2019.
$55 billion in losses over ~5 years? That's a substantial amount.
Not a drop in the bucket of their revenues, though. This is really about someone feeling angst that they can't get an extra quarter percent increase in profits for the quarter so that the dividends go up just so slightly.
Wow, that's like half the total value of Nike!!!
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/NKE/Or about the same as Ford:
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/F/
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 AI drones and roboos 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 military focus as well). So many VR influencers were salivating 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.
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? Personally 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.
Damn. Sorry to hear about that emotion a soulless corporation is having.
Lemmy hates Meta but honestly the Quest 3 is a fantastic headset. I use mine semi-regularly for wireless Steam VR.
I don't think anybody is under the impression that their engineers are stupid or that they can't make decent hardware when they want to.
They just rightly think that Facebook is an absolutely evil company.
A lot of clueless people here are calling the Quest shit product tho. I can understand not wanting to give money to facebook but the tech is incredible.
Too bad that it will turn into a brick once meta decides to axe their VR department.
I couldn't go back after using the Valve Index, though. Wireless or not, it's too much of a compromise on quality.
Edit: sleepy typo
What about the Index is an improvement over the Quest 3 in terms of quality? Looking up the specs, the Quest 3 seems to be handily beating the Index, a 5 year old headset. Pancake lenses alone are such a massive jump in visual clarity that it's hard to consider buying a headset that still uses fresnel lenses.
I would agree with you if we were comparing the Index against the Quest 2 for sure, but the Quest 3 sets quite a high bar.
You could?
Quest is from Oculus, Metaverse is from Facebook, different management leads to different quality
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!
Do VR/AR glasses like in the picture actually exist?
The Xreal Air~, or the just-being-released Xreal Air 2 Ultra, is potentially that.
Oled displays and cameras for tracking objects and hands.
Edit: also just saw this
Cool, thanks!
I think the closest were the prototypes like Google Glass but even they canned it.
Those are just smart glasses, I don't see any mentioned of AR / integrated displays.
No.
"meta unhappy" good…
u/chemical_cutthroat Reportedly Happy With How Much Money Meta's VR Division Burns
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.
VR is over rated as fuck. It will never be mainstream.
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.
"VR" at its heart is just 3D goggles, motion sensors, software, etc. So yes it's overrated but I don't see any tech reason why it couldn't be mainstream. It takes a really dumb and shitty company to fuck it up.
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.
Y'all are pissy at Meta, but I hope they are successful. A virtual reality social network is a fantastic idea and I hope they can figure out a way to bring a cool communication app to the masses. That camera that followed you was a great idea that got lost in the Facebook hate.
If there's anything we've learned over the past couple decades, then that any sort of social network by this company is a terrible idea.
No idea what camera you're talking about, but we need less cameras, not more. I don't want to get recorded or live streamed by some strangers either, especially not if it is some stupid as drone that causes even more noise pollution.
I'm absolutely ready to admit that I'm probably just too old to embrace this cool new thing but I've just never really been that excited about it.
To be absolutely honest, the idea that a corporation can control what I'm seeing in some altered or virtual reality just makes my skin crawl.
I understand that most people won't feel the way I do. I understand that my preferences may be unusual.
It's just not my thing.
Nice try, cuckerberg