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.
You're viewing a single thread.
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.
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.
Yeah, well, don't tell the local patrons, I'm in like post a hundred below of "how dare you acknowledge anything remotely serviceably about a Meta-related product".
But yeah, no, you're pretty much right. They're subsidizing a huge chunk of that entire corner of tech. I don't think it's a mainstream type of device, but I'm glad we all got to spend a few years messing with it as a semi-viable consumer product, even if it's just a bit of an overengineered novelty thing.
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.
Imagine an immersive movie with 360 views.
My neck is already hurting from craning all the time. And I'm guaranteed to miss the best part of the movie because I was looking in the wrong direction.
Moto X (2013) has a 360 demo movie on it. It was alright and neat to spin around in your chair to follow the action, but at the same time I could have sat still and the camera moved.
My crippling adhd would like a word