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.
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.
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.
90% of technology companies quit before making a hit VR product. We should encourage Meta to spend more.
Let’s hope Meta sinks every last dime of their profit into “the next big thing” that is their VR division
I’d much rather see meta burn money into the fun project that is VR rather than AI or crypto.
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.
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.
Call it what you want, but this requirement prevents me from buying their products too. I use no Meta services. Don’t wanna start.
Welcome to the classic social media 100m dash. Become a popular dunk target on socials > get people to call such and such choice as a dealbreaker > stop doing such and such > it is now “not enough”, or “they’ll enshittify it later” or “a slippery slope”.
Which fine, whatever. I’m not saying Meta are “good guys” (no corporation is, honestly). What I will say is a) that is not a particularly productive or functional way to engage with pretty much anything, especially when there is no comparable alternative to a product, and b) this is a remarkable incentive to NOT acknowledge criticism. I mean, if I’m Meta and I see this often, what is the incentive to not just force everybody to EULA away as much as possible? People will give me crap for it regardless, so I may as well get to sell some sweet, sweet data.
FWIW, I’m skeptical of the ability of Meta to turn around the VR market as a whole, I don’t like many of their privacy and content moderation practices and I no longer use Facebook, Instagram or Threads. But hey, I do have a Whatsapp account because it’s pretty much mandatory to exist in society, and I do have a Quest headset, which I agree is the best price to performance you can buy and works flawlessly with PC VR both wired and wirelessly.
[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.
Holy shit, give me just one billion per year and I’ll build you a sexier failure.
give me one billion period and ill build you a kickass vr set without bullshit, and ill probably have money spare for me and possibly descendants to retire. people underestimate how much money one billion actually is.
People underestimate how much a fucking Million is! It’s like a lifetime salary (3k/m for 27.8 years).
We should call billions thousand millions.
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/