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This one should be studied in management schools.
I'm not sure I have ever witnessed such a comprehensive industrial failure in the software world. There were some discussions about Facebook's ability to pull it off, but not that long ago, many still saw the "metaverse" vision as inevitable; a clear trajectory for the future of the internet.
And the failure isn't Zuckerberg's alone. Microsoft, Apple, and a good many others all crashed into the same wall.
> not that long ago, many still saw the "metaverse" vision as inevitable; a clear trajectory for the future of the internet.
> And the failure isn't Zuckerberg's alone. Microsoft, Apple, and a good many others all crashed into the same wall.
This is revisionary. Mark Zuckerberg's Meta was the only company to go all-in on the "metaverse". Microsoft has barely even dabbled in an adjacent area with the Hololens.
Apple has essentially zero exposure to anything like the "metaverse". Apple's Spatial Computing and its use of Personas and SharePlay is not like the "metaverse", despite the comparison between Meta's and Apple's efforts being perhaps inevitable.
The metaverse, as Meta pursued it, was a social media virtual reality space, and only one of the three companies you mention touted and offered a product for users in this space.
I think that Kinect and Hololens, or Magic Leap, or the VisioPro and the numerous other attempts are not simply adjacent, they are parts of the same ontology.
The goal is to replace displays and interactions by something new, more immersive, spatial and relying on movements rather than mechanical buttons.
And in my opinion they all failed for the same reasons, and it is on the input side.
The idea of a metaverse as a new internet was a way to capture was was seen an an inevitable evolution, but in the grand scheme of things, this is almost anecdotal.
Everything Meta did to make it a "platform" just contributed to making it worse than VRchat, a product by a company many many times smaller. It felt very designed with a "look at what we can do for Meta" and not "why would consumers use this over alternatives?" which always felt doomed from the start.
Meta (Facebook) always had a problem in execution even when their vision was solid which is sadly a rare occasion. This is why meta just buys products instead of developing its own (Instagram, Whatsapp, etc). It had a moment with the ray bans but that didn't last, the second iteration was meta'd all over.
This; I mean, they even renamed the company.
They needed to rename the company anyway to get away from bad press. It worked. I think they're quite happy with their current name.
Yup. The Facebook brand was long dead, and Meta is a good tech name even outside of AR/VR or metaverse. The fact that no one calls the company Facebook anymore shows that the rebrand was successful.
Very few outside of tech call it Meta. Just like no one calls Alphabet "Alphabet", they just say "Google".
It's very different though. Alphabet was created more for financial book keeping. Google apps have no Alphabet branding. On the other hand, Meta was created because the Facebook brand was down in the rabbit hole, almost every product of it has the Meta branding prominently displayed.
Anecdotal but my parents know about Meta, because they use FB/Messenger daily. They have no idea what Alphabet is.
I still see people refer to “FAANG” regularly. Though, there have been times I’ve read “MAANG”… doesn’t quite feel the same.
I’ve heard MANGA suggested as the acronym with Facebook’s new name. Though maybe it should be MAAAN, said in a tone of exasperation at tech company activities
>> The fact that no one calls the company Facebook anymore shows that the rebrand was successful.
Don't they? I have to remind myself that it's actually called Meta, I always call it facebook.
> It worked.
Debatable.
Is it really? Instagram, arguably the most popular (or maybe just behind TikTok, I'm not sure) social network currently, has successfully disengaged from the tainted Facebook name entirely. It may seem like a small thing but I do think that has a deep impact on the average person's perception of the service. Especially in the younger generation, the Facebook name has a definite "ick" to it (is that what the kids say these days?), even if it's just because it's the "boomer social network" and not because of the myriad privacy concerns associated with it.
Is it possible all this was a major ploy to get around antitrust? I'm aware FB has been working on VR for a while even beyond the Oculus that they purchased but it's like... "Facebook bought Whatsapp, yes, but; we're Meta"
the rename came at a nadir of "Facebook" brand when there was lots of hate for misinfo, genocide incitement on the platform, etc. I think that's the more important context rather than "lol i bet we'll fool the antitrust guys w/ a quick name change"
Yeah fair enough, it was a dumb comment
Still, the rename to Meta was a cynical ploy regardless
> Microsoft has barely even dabbled in an adjacent area with the Hololens.
Well, I think of that more being due to their mismanagement with the whole WMR ecosystem. "Sterile corporate VR meeting rooms" sounds like exactly something that would have been from Microsoft rather than Facebook, but they tried too hard in some aspects (a half dozen companies making nearly-identical-but-not-really headsets! support built into the OS so deep that to remove it they had to brick everyone's headsets!) and not at all in others.
> Microsoft has barely even dabbled in an adjacent area with the Hololens.
This is revisionist, Microsoft has been tilting at the same windmill for a long time too.
They even created and subsequently removed their own native platform for Windows, used by many hardware vendors, whose products were bricked by the Windows update that removed the feature.
I also commented on WMR, but I took that as MS not being "all-in on the metaverse". VR alone isn't the same thing, and HoloLens as a platform seemed to have more of a vision for working in shared mixed reality.
I love my WMR headset, but Microsoft wasn't really pushing hard for the kinds of "social" experiences Meta was trying to get us to participate in.
I am not sure we can say `all-in` when a more or less complete write down leaves them in the top 10 largest companies.
>Apple has essentially zero exposure to anything like the "metaverse"
holy revisionism batman. It's literally right in https://www.apple.com/apple-vision-pro/. Half the page is "you can watch movies in 3D", the other half is "you can be next to people". They rewrote the visual appearance of all their OSes to match liquid glass on the Vision Pro. Their goggles display your eyes because they expected you to wear them so long it would make it feel more natural to the plebs around you not wearing them and not joining you enjoying spatial sound. Half their ad copy is about "making it feel like you're working next to people".
Apple went all in onto the whole Metaverse crap. They paid off just about every major tech reviewer, tech influencer and even tech bros with following on Twitter (and here, too) with "early access programs" to the Vision Pro. At least can give them kind of the benefit of the doubt because they somewhat quickly saw that it was a dead end.
I'm kind of sad they're now officially dumping it, it was always so much fun to see completely fake sponsored discussions on the Metaverse and Metaverse ads in podcasts, and book publications about it. There's something satisfying about watching that whole universe of cognitive dissonance and pretense. Like a sandbox demonstration of the fake hype this industry often indulges in.
Remember when they added legs and they were soooo proud of how it now had legs? But then turned out the legs weren't actually available, it was some minions wearing a motion capture suit specifically for the demo?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2022/10/14/mark-zucke...
> During the most talked-about segment of the show, Zuckerberg proudly announced that legs were coming the metaverse, which sounds bizarre out of context (and kind of in-context), but it’s the solution to many years of Meta VR avatars being nothing but floating torsos. He and another Meta worker showed off their new legs by kicking and jumping, and Zuckerberg talked a little bit about legs and why it’s taken so long to get them.
> “I know you’ve been waiting for this. Everyone has been waiting for this,” said Zuckerberg. “But seriously, legs are hard, which is why other virtual reality systems don’t have them either.”
> But it turns out the legs that were shown off with all that kicking and jumping were fake. That was not actually Mark jumping, the sequence was pre-rendered for the show.
I just want my glasses to tell me how to make a.... hmmm... let's see... how about a Korean inspired steak sauce.
I like how everything around the Metaverse is basically like a "Silicon Valley" storyline.
> And the failure isn't Zuckerberg's alone.
I used to work at meta, I was in one of the many research teams that were upstream of horizon.
The Failure was pretty much entirely Zuck's fault, in the same way that when a ship smashes into rocks, its the captain's responsibility.
The first big problem is that there was never a clear definition of what "the metaverse" was mean to be. It was a pivot that kinda appear after orion (the AR glasses that were supposed to ship in 2020 Q3) failed to ship.
A small team had made a VR clone of roblox, where you could make your own games in VR. It was low poly and stuttery on the Quest. Another team was working on getting hand interaction into the quest. A third team thought "hmm, we have a avatar system, what if we can type on keyboards? could we have meetings"
The meeting system and the roblox clone carried on, vaguely separately. Then Zuck saw them and decided that they needed 500 more engineers each. Time passed, progress wasn't fast enough, so more engineers were smeared in.
Then the meta rebrand, and then the whole weird everything smashed together branding.
All the while more engineers were being piled in, most of them had no experience in 3d, let alone games.
But, that would have been fine if someone at the top had been steering, making joined up product decisions, Advocating for the users. carmack sorta tried, but a) he wasn't the easiest to work with and B) Boz thought he knew better
TLDR: Zuck can't product for shit. He thought that shipping disjointed features would make a platform. It didn't. He also thought that dumping 11,000 people into an org, most of which have no experience of games, VR, 3d or graphics would lead to a good outcome.
>Zuck can't product for shit
He never could. That's why he just buys everything.
I wonder why he didnt just buy his way into this too. I guess Valve wasn't up for sale haha.
But he could have tried the VRChat folks, and Bigscreen. I guess he bought the Beat Saber folks, but he probably needed to buy a big game studio and maybe one with experience shipping successful MMORPGs.
I'm pretty sure they will have at least tried to buy roblox.
The Oculus is actually pretty decent for the price and as a standalone device. The issue is the OS feels so... like it was built by a big company with a dysfunctional org chart?
It's still an unfocused mess.
The bigger issue is, VR will ALWAYS be a niche thing. Always on AR glasses are the real future bet, not a niche industry.
VR will never be as big as Facebook / Instagram / WhatsApp. It just doesn't make sense to invest so much into it. Not sure what Zuck doesn't see this?
IMO, VR could be huge, but it’s never going to happen when the platform is so locked down.
Meta could of been the hardware leader of a thriving ecosystem, but instead they tried to replicate the walled garden of app stores that are failing in 2026.
> Always on AR glasses are the real future bet
Glassholes are the future?
VR headsets are at least fun. These glasses though, seem really dumb. I doubt they will ever be ubiquitous. I certainly wouldn't be caught dead wearing a surveillance device made by Facebook of all companies.
>> These glasses though, seem really dumb. I doubt they will ever be ubiquitous.
Apparently they sold 7 million of these things according to the latest report, so at least some people like them(or the idea of them).
Meta essentially made a sequel to Second Life.
I've always been blown away by the fact that they didn't more fully pursue VR gaming. I think they could have found a more enthusiastic audience.
Zuck never seemed to actually articulate how this was any different or newer than a sterile corporate vr version of second life. Then VRChat got big and seemed to be better than Horizon Worlds for... everything.
I feel like the main possible benefits that these digital spaces bring, for consumers, are kinda the opposite of things that any Big Corporate Entity would ever want to be involved in.
Zuck just goes 'all in' on every hype and blows billions, because he doesnt want to miss out on anything. What is a few 10s of billions here and there for a company with a money printer.
Seems like maybe that mindset is where he won the hands of cards that turned into the money printer… so he just understands portfolio theory?
I'm pretty sure Facebook didn't need 10 billion $ before it became successful. It became successful, then they invested more and more as it grew.
It seems like there really isn't much of a market for VR gaming, though. It would have failed just as miserably.
Not only because of hardware costs, but not everybody can play them for extended periods of time and 'the youth' are increasingly preferring to look at social media over playing games.
I don't think it's anywhere near peaking yet.
It's probably already far more popular than the 3DTV of the 2010s.
VR will probably always be pretty niche for gaming. Even with affordable headsets, there is still a lot of friction to their daily usage that limits their appeal
- VR sickness
- Lack of physical space in people's homes
- Don't really work as a shared experience without multiple headsets
On top of that, this company in particular is Facebook. Nobody likes Facebook.
I am one of those people who love VR gaming done well. There is a game called Super Rumble built by what I think is a subsidiary of Meta. It's a very well executed arena FPS concept. There are just a couple dozen people in the world who are really skilled and play enough for me to recognize them and be glad they're playing when I'm also online. It's magical when there are good people on this thing playing together.
I hope it's something we can figure out how to propagate despite the seemingly limited interest. I suspect anyone who liked playing quake arena games would love this game if they are not susceptible to motion sickness.
I recently started exploring how to port open source shooters (red eclipse, warsow, nexuiz) to the platform and realized there are several considerations that make games designed for VR special that a pure port wouldn't hit.
I think VR gaming can easily grow 10x - 100x by having cheaper, better fidelity, less bulky hardware and a better games library.
I bet plenty of gamers haven't bought their first headset yet despite being interested.
You're not wrong, but it also seems the most plausible use of VR for now. Those shortcomings also apply to Horizon Worlds.
Zuck and Co just completely failed to read the room. Horizons didn't fail because the technology wasn't ready - it failed because nobody actually wanted the product. It didn't solve any problem and added a ton of friction (headsets, eye goggles, no legs, etc). The headsets were uncomfortable and isolating. The vibes were creepy and weird.
The rolled it out like a cheesy corporate team-building mandatory exercise, not something where anyone would want to actually spend any time by choice.
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It's not really netiquette to accuse people of AI generated comments unless it's clear
Doesn't look AI-generated at all to me.
I think it's because I used a dash! Clearly need to train myself out of using those lest be accused of using ai.
The AI would have generated an em-dash instead of a hyphen
> many still saw the "metaverse" vision as inevitable; a clear trajectory for the future of the internet.
As a VR enthusiast, I beg to differ. Anyone who had spent a lot of time in the space knew that this was largely a hardware problem.
You need a lightweight, see-through head mounted display. It needs to be aware of local lighting conditions and does more than just room mapping, which means it needs a lot of compute power. It needs to have eye tracking (for minor perceptual angle drawing, at least), a high resolution (or light field) display. It needs to stay cool, and have a 6+ hour battery life (which is one working session). Oh, and people don't like any tethers. Or controllers. Which means extremely accurate hand tracking and integration with a keyboard/mouse. Price doesn't matter, as much as people think. AVP costs less today than a mid tier powerbook 25 years ago. But that also needs to come down.
Apple Vision Pro is the first VR/AR headset to come close, by the way. And even that is very far off. In fact, I'd blame that more for this shutdown than anything single other thing: it demonstrated that Meta's hardware labs were so fundamentally off for what they were trying to achieve that it basically rendered their entire investment useless.
It reminds me of Google Plus. I think you could make parallels to how heavily some of the tech companies were pushing ML?
Yes! And now Meta is chasing that too and failing. It's not clear to me what advantage developing its own LLMs affords Meta. Google and the other platform companies, I get it, but it's not like Meta is using what's unique about their social data to train something interesting.
I think the general strategy for a long time in the tech world was to have as many of the programmers as you could under your umbrella. You don't necessarily know what you are racing towards, but the general feel was you knew that programmers were going to get there.
It also deprives your competition of their product, and/or bids up their cost.
Meta is just paying engineers not to work at any other faang company.
So that they can push those stupid AI questions at the bottom of Facebook posts
Zuck seriously seems to have no clue how to do anything. His entire existence is stealing other people's stuff
Speaking of Apple, and honesty asking: how are their VR devices going? Looks like they released a spec'ed up version with the M5 processor end of 2025 but, what's their future? There was some (artificial?) hype in the beginning, are people actually using it? What's the SV landscape?
Nobody knows what's going to happen. The device and the ecosystem absolutely did not live up to the hype, but Apple is still investing in it, including software updates. Rumors are that they are developing a second gen headset targeting $2000 price point, but they are also leaning into smart glass products.
Otherwise, look up WSJ reporting on the subject and reddit.
It sold terribly. The update was super-minimal, and mostly seemed to have been made for production-simplification reasons (as in: it was cheaper to update it than to keep making the old product, and they apparently didn't want to just cancel it entirely).
Rumors of future products are never super-reliable, but point to their ambitions being downscaled at best. Really, everyone expects them to pivot to smart glasses, because that's what they clearly wanted to make all along, and there's probably a market for smart glasses in a way there isn't for... whatever the AVP was supposed to be.
In the Apple ecosystem 'just a spec bump' is pretty significant IMHO. So often they will completely disregard products and just let them languish. The Mac Pro still only comes with the M2 chip.
All companies, those with enough resources, tend to put money on all the horses when they can—Meta, Apple, Microsoft included.
I was surprised though that one of them changed the name of their entire company.
Ever since the "power glove" and that 1st lauding of "VR" in the 90's, I've been bullish. People don't want that shit on their heads (I keep shouting). If you want to argue that people want immersion, I'll suggest they also want immersion that they can instantly look away from.
I agree with you... but was it actually a failure? I feel like that would require to have some kind of negative consequences, which I don't think Meta has faced over this. They've still been rewarded handsomely.
The hardware is actually pretty decent, and some VR games work really well. For example this table tennis simulator honestly feels life the real thing, even down to the little "tap" in the bat when you hit the ball :
https://www.meta.com/en-gb/experiences/eleven-table-tennis/1...
The while time I've owned a Quest, I've never felt the need or desire to launch the Horizon App.
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And the fact that any CEO would still hold their job after spending billions to no avail, is astounding.
Im just confused how such a mediocre project came out of such a big budget.
> many still saw the "metaverse" vision as inevitable
TBH, people who don't use VR probably think it inevitable due to all the ads, marketing, and especially movies' romanticized of the virtual world. People who actually bought a headset and put it on their faces know this shit will never become mainstream in the current form factor.
No, Microsoft bailed pretty early. Apple gave it one shot and gave up.
The entire VR/AR industry sort of crumpled up and died while metaverse was still burning a billion dollars a day.
I worked in a VR startup at the time. Nobody could find a customer and all the competing startups slowly bled to death (including mine). Everyone was really holding their breath that Apple Vision would bring some life back to the industry, but once it became clear that it was a flop, everyone gave up.
I remember two Gamescom visits.
First one was I think during the releae of the first Oculus, when still hardly anyone got to actually try out VR headsets. An absolutely HUGE area in one of the main halls, the queue going once around the entire area, many hours of waiting time, etc.
Second visit was two years later, in the "indies, hobbyists and everything else hall" - staffers of some Chinese gaming startup were stopping random passersbys and essentially pleading for them to try their VR game - the headset of course being technically superior than the Oculus during the first visit...
Meta going so hard was part of the covid “new normal” psychosis. Surely we’ll all just stay home and buy crypto assets for the rest of our lives! The hardware I think is pretty good - I just never really found a use for it.
The hardware tech wasn't ready, but they thought they could overcome it quickly. Turns out is expensive as f even for a fairly bad device.
There was never a demand for this, but a lot of paid hype being blasted into confused faces.
I think it was totally predictable, I was telling my colleagues at Meta back then the Metaverse was completely toast in 2020 for a variety of reasons that only Mark Zuckerberg in his infinite wisdom couldn't see clear as day.
The Metaverse was not something that Meta was good at, they went about it all wrong and it was doomed to fail.
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The management of the whole Reality Labs thing was incredibly bad, and this is Zuck's fault, I agree.
But my take is that, given the efforts of other big player in the same field (Hololens, VisionPro, the VR stuff from Valve, Sony, Samsung, etc.) at least one of them would have gained traction and the entire field would have followed behind.
I think the vision was wrong.
Decoy division to hide AI buildout, but I doubt it fooled anyone in the know.
Is this speculation?
Common sense.
• Not just a Meta failure: 70+ years of VR history (including Microsoft’s Hololens flops and Apple’s Vision Pro stagnation) shows every major player slammed into the exact same wall: betting billions on “inevitable” infrastructure instead of experiences that actually answer “why VR?”
• The metaverse was never inevitable: Horizon Worlds peaked at 300k MAUs, cratered below 1k DAUs, and is now shutting down. Meta burned $73B building ghost towns; the real survivors (Beat Saber: $255M revenue, VRChat: 150k+ concurrent) succeeded by giving users embodied activities and emotional hooks, not empty virtual offices.
• Hardware wasn’t the problem: Quest 3 is cheap, comfortable, and capable. The comprehensive crash happened because giants chased AAA ports and productivity tools while ignoring what actually retains users: presence + community + meaning.
• Management-school case study, updated: The $70B lesson isn’t “VR died.” It’s that corporate metaverse bets failed exactly where indies and niches thrived.
Full breakdown of what works (and why the giants missed it) here: https://linernotesxr.substack.com/p/what-works-in-vr-lessons...
VRChat won because it's a relatively open platform. That's it. The people in there spent money on Meta hardware when it was better but they would then use it only in VRChat.
If a big company embraced an open platform I suspect the space would be far successful. Still a lot of untapped potential.
VRChat is successful because someone can show up in a Goku avatar and start roleplaying. A DJ can stream their twitch steam right into an instance.
VRChat still has no real store system having people upload unity projects manually to use a custom avatar. There's an entire universe of potential revenue if a clothing, avatar, and instance space system was built into the client.
You can buy avatars now from the VRChat marketplace for VRChat credits (that yre essentially Japanese Yen in value :D). It is progress but wit the unfortunate bad practices of the platform reportedly taking a sizeable cut.
In that regard the long term practice of the artists and users of their creations (mainly avatars) transacting directly via Booth or Gumroad can be seen as healthier & more robust long term.
Don't post AI generated comments.
As a VRChat regular, Meta's VR world efforts have been hilarious every step of the way. So long and thanks for all the headsets! :)
Maybe not everything has to be the next big thing for everyone. Maybe it's valuable for smaller companies or sovereign divisions to find niche markets, and simply build products and services for modest profits for strong customer bases that will never hit hypergrowth. (And are therefore resistant to the cancerous financialization that hypergrowth invites/incites)
I hope they figure out how to make a modest but steady profit making headsets still. The Quest Pro is still my favorite headset, ever since I ditched the awful controllers and went back to Index controllers.
Then again, the Steam Frame is likely to deliver us from this reliance, though it would be really nice to keep having budget headset options.
What do you feel, as someone who likes VR, were Meta's big pitfalls, and what do you like about VRChat that you feel like Meta missed?
VRChat came out more than 5 years before Horizon Worlds did, and already had an established player base by the time Horizon Worlds even came out. It was in early access for ages, but that didn't matter to the VR audience, who's used to there being jank. Not to mention that Horizon Worlds was probably never more of a finished product than VRChat to any significant degree.
If you've already got a VR social space, why switch to a different one?
VRChat was designed for people to hang out, Horizon Worlds was built as a platform for people to purchase meta services and desired corporate use which came with a lot of sterility (you don’t want half the people in your corporate all hands to be some form of anime girl, see the reactions that even just Anubis’ logo gets here).
This came in both world design and novel design where vrchat lets people import basically arbitrary 3d models with a wide range of expressiveness. VR went for corporate Memphis upper torsos which immediately makes the world feel more bland. Letting people import whatever would also eliminate the opportunity for meta to sell that, and have the risk that there might be too much breast for a corporate audience.
Add to that and the fundamentals just worked so much better in VRChat when horizon worlds tried to make its big splash and the fate was sealed.
Porn, for one.
Massively Overpowered reports:
"Facebook/Meta’s Horizon Worlds is officially sunsetting its VR version in June in a move that will probably make all five of its players sad.
The Mark Zuckerberg metaverse monstrosity has been around since 2020 and was designed as a virtual reality metaverse world back when people were trying to make metaverse things happen and pretending Second Life didn’t exist. (It was a deeply exhausting era.) However, Horizon Worlds’ game/world/metaverse was poorly received and widely mocked, owing largely to dreadful graphics, redundant content, and oh yeah, that whole thing where people didn’t have legs. The boondoggle has led to thousands of layoffs and billions in financial losses, proving it is still possible for companies to lose money trying to make VR happen."
> With its potential to generate up to $5 trillion in value by 2030, the metaverse is too big for companies to ignore. [1]
[1] https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/growth-marketing-and-s...
The problem is that this cool technology got taken over and advanced by companies, Meta and Apple, that are not games companies and do not understand nor are interested in games.
So what occurred was an exercise in trying to force a square peg into a round hole, while the actual obviously interesting use of the technology (games!) was sidelined and ignored.
It's a real shame I picked up a PSVR and really enjoyed playing around with it. Seems like this particular niche however is not enough to fund the mega expenditure required to move the technology to the next level where it would genuinely get more mass adoption.
As it is feels like VR is going to die out at the Wii U point, just before it gets technically good enough (read lightweight) to be the successful Switch.
Otoh, someone with a massive checkbook had to fund the hardware and optical research to enable the devices. Small gaming studios weren’t going to be able to do that. A lot of the smaller VR device companies weren’t able to build on top of core research or hire people that learned on Zuck’s dime.
Or Valve’s time. Like HTC were basically given the core of their Vive product by valve before valve built their own
So surely after Meta bought oculus, they made major advancements in the field right?
As an engineer I love that Zuck likes to throw his money around. He has been one of the big reasons for SWE salary inflation over the past 15 years. We should be thankful that not every company is relentlessly cost cutting
You mean throw those billions, tens of thousands of man hours, shareholder attenton, industry power and mindshare to a mostly useless concept, just because he had the money? Why are those resources not better spent on 100+ startups and 100+ unique ideas that are immediately tested by the market?
Just because the end concept was useless doesn’t mean the individual pieces don’t have value. Meta’s loose wallet probably kickstarted the work of dozens of smaller companies in the hardware space whose work can be parlayed into other areas.
Facebook's mismanagement of VR financed and launched Anduril.
It was not very efficient usage of the money. It actually ended up paying for overpriced real estate in the bay area and vanity toys such as Porsches.
Considering other mega corps would either hoard the cash or increase dividends, the fact that any money went to engineers is a win. Saying the money would be better spent funding startups does not reflect any real possibility.
That would be useful if they open sourced the effort. Otherwise it will die of total irrelevance 15-30 years from now.
If you look around at the startup scene the past 5-10 years, has it really been any better?
Meta has more than enough money to do all of that at the same time
On the other hand they seem to do layoffs liberally too. Feels like thrash from the outsider's view.
Hilarious thing to say a couple days after the news of 20% layoffs at Meta dropped. This is after a 10% "performance based" layoff last year and successive rounds of 10%+ layoffs post-covid in 2022-23.
The company may have been a wonderland for devs a decade ago, but at this point it is right up there with Amazon in terms of terrible work environments, internal politics, PIPs and layoffs.
Meta employee count has been increasing for the last 3 years, same as other tech companies: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/META/meta-platform...
PIPs and layoffs have always been a thing in tech. That's kinda one of the defining traits of the industry.
I am still surprised that they thought they'd see success with the extremely low quality version they shipped at launch. Just awful models and missing features along with a completely lackluster and shallow vision for what any sort of VR world could be.
Like, how did Zuck look at what was being demoed and think "yes, this is worth shipping" at a time when the closest analogue, 3D games and CG movies, were delivering fidelity that was ~4 hardware generations ahead, in implementation and in design.
To be impressed by and willing to sell the world on his metaverse implementation in that state... it felt like the dude hadn't seen any digital 3d entertainment since 2002.
Cause he doesn't actually want to spend time in a VR world, and has no idea what a good or bad one would be. He just was hoping it was the next smartphone and he'd own the platform.
We've all forgotten the facebook phone failure but I doubt Mark has. He wants control further up the stack. Breaking into OSes is very hard but if you squinted just right VR kind of sort of looked like a green field that was ripe for the taking.
You almost have to feel sorry for Zucc.
Genuine question - was it the product or the implementation that led this to not pan out? Maybe both?
Maybe the metaverse is a viable concept or maybe it isn't. But Meta doesn't care about the metaverse or the potential users of it -- they simply want their own platform similar to how Google has Android, and Apple has iOS, and Microsoft has Windows. Apple, in particular, is a thorn in their side.
Not caring about what the user's want is the first problem. The second is that they wanted this done yesterday. So rather than evolving the technology and seeing where the market was going, they tried to build the whole thing at once immediately.
They didn't know what they were building, how to build it, and they threw it together as quickly as possible. The result was, unsurprisingly, pretty lame.
Then to justify the expenditure, they then forced it into every aspect of their Quest devices trying to force adoption. Unsurprisingly again, this failed and also pissed off all their Quest customers and damaged the viability of that platform.
Meta thought they could simply spend their billions and that would be enough to succeed.
No one wants to wear a PC on their faces. The few who did wanted that for games but Zuck wanted a social VR platform, not a third-rate gaming console. Games couldn't even bring in the numbers needed to pivot anyone to social so they're giving up.
> No one wants to wear a PC on their faces.
This has yet to be determined! Because no VR headset so far has actually been a proper PC. You can't develop on them. You can't just install whatever TF you want. You have to use their app store and getting developer mode enabled doesn't even give you root on the device.
A more accurate statement would be, "No one wants to wear a locked-down, extremely limited-use phone on their faces."
When the Steam Frame comes out, then we'll see how much of a difference having full control over your VR hardware can make. It runs SteamOS and you can install whatever you want. It's a complete Linux distro! An actual PC on your face.
Putting Linux on a headset will do nothing to change that the average person wants no part of one on their face. You can develop for the Vision Pro inside the Vision Pro today, and few people care.
Maybe a game library as large as Steam's will make it a little more appealing, but unlikely. The Quest has a good sized library and seems to have saturated the market.
Godot on the Quest allows you to develop on the device which is at least cool even if it makes little sense. You’d see the virtual world around you adapt to the changes in the editor. That was one on the reasons I bought it, even if I never used it in the end
I tried out an actual IBM PC, wearable version in about 2000. It was kind of neat and ran DOS. Never really took off though. This thing https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-pc-goes-readytowear
Neither. The VR space simply isn't it. Sounds cool in science fiction but nobody wants to spend their life with a giant headset strapped to their face. Their Orion glasses were the first time I could see the space actually going mainstream, but I'm not sure if they will ever be able to take it past the prototype stage.
If you're interested, Folding Ideas did a video essay covering the metaverse and why it never really took off, that's really well done. However the main bullet points:
* Text is the bedrock of basically any content online and text is uniquely difficult to convey in a VR setting without being annoying. It either ends up just floating in space or you have to attach it to objects or you anchor it to a HUD, and a HUD has its own cavalcade of issues in VR around motion sickness. The most successful VR applications, paradoxically, involve the least text they can manage.
* In order to make things accessible to a wide market the applications have to be incredibly simple, to run well on bad hardware, which is uniquely difficult with a 3D space you have to render twice while maintaining high enough FPS to not give people motion sickness
* Most often any CTA in the environment would simply load a web browser, because you couldn't actually... like, buy a product in VR. You were redirected to an amazon listing or shopify website.
* And that's before you get to maintenance. Any intern can update a website. A VR space requires either a dedicated dev budget or accepting whatever janky building tools the platform ships with, which have never once been good enough to build anything actually worth visiting.
* Putting all that aside, there seems to be a substantial slice of humanity who just are not compatible with the tech. I myself enjoy it regularly, I had some issues with motion sickness early on, but toughing it out for awhile got me my "VR legs" as it were and it hasn't been an issue, but I've heard all kinds of things where people's physiology just rejects the headsets.
Overall I think it's just far better as a niche gaming thing and the only reason Facebook and others went so hard into the metaverse was to hopefully recreate the birth of the Internet, and to become landlords of a new digital frontier. And for that, fuck em.
You also have to be "all in", so to speak, in order to participate. I can window or minimize a screen on a PC. I can pause a game on a console. I'm immediately aware of my surroundings in both cases. With a VR headset, I have to physically remove the headset before I see where I am within physical space.
It feels so silly expressing this, but the act of putting on a headset that completely engulfs my vision with screens, even if my space is already clear with a boundary, feels like a much bigger commitment than opening Steam. It doesn't matter if I'm standing for room scale or if I'm already seated with the headset next to me. Both cases feel like extra effort for a lesser experience.
I think Meta's position as a large company under (rightfully) a lot of media scrutiny fundamentally prevents it from creating a successful "metaverse". It'll be pushed towards being overly corporate/sanitized and centrally controlled to meet expectations of managing misinformation, player safety, etc. opposed to the less restricted conditions that resulted in the web. Smaller companies (like VRChat) or individual hobbyists can get away with more, and generally have less cynical motivations.
Microsoft was in the middle of the biggest antitrust case in history (both in the US and the EU) and successfully launched the Xbox in that time. They had Halo and local multiplayer up to 8 players across 2 connected consoles requiring no internet. Meta didn't have anything besides a naked desire to pursue the end (monetize the user) before the means (a product people wanted).
Both and also AI became the sexy thing before they really got anywhere with metaverse shit
I think it was both the horrible technical implementation and the full and total control they demanded over it. It's like what I would imagine the Oasis to look like ten years after the bad guys won in Ready Player One.
The internet only succeeded because it was so free and open at the beginning, decentralized, open protocols, everything free, no borders, no censorship, no surveillance just hackers that layed the foundation with no restrictions placed upon them (except the severe technical limitations of the time for them to overcome). Of course that's almost all gone now with capitalism taking over turning everything to shit, but that came only after it already was successful.
Meta's vision and implementation of the metaverse was exactly the opposite end of the spectrum in every way from the start: centralized, commercial, proprietary, censored, surveilled, restricted, closed, walls everywhere, safe, advertiser friendly, it was uncool, not fun and no style. Like they paid people to create shitty "worlds" and force their employees to use it, otherwise nobody touched that shitshow willingly, except (concerningly) for some random toddlers for some reason.
Was the product. It's fundamentally unsound, but beyond that, why would you be in that thing? The Metaverse had barely any content worth using, there was no reason to buy it beyond disposable income and novelty.
So broadly, they should have acquired VRChat and just slapped their name on it before its own developers enshittified it, but nooooooo...
I'm really glad they did no do that! That would be the end of VRChat & big damage for the community, basically requiring a migration to to inevitable replacement.
Just see what Facebook did to BeatSabre and other VR games and Game studios they acquired.
Sure, they could have cloned it, but better with more money - that would be less questionable, especially if it actually worked out.
Well, at least they helped to provide affordable headsets for VRChat players at the right time. :)
Fair enough, it is really striking how VRChat got so much right about the medium.
"Metaverse" will never happen because we don't fit in the wires and can't eat electricity.
You can never opt out of reality, so that dramatically reduces the value of a metaverse, and people don't ever actually want pretend reality.
If you are willing to relax the parameters to eliminate the full VR immersion and "rich presence" and other superficial nonsense that moron Execs want because they have no imagination and just think making Ready Player One will make them rich, then we've had the "Metaverse" since the 90s. It's the internet.
In terms of a digital space with user generated content, there have been tons. Some even successful. Meta had ample knowledge to draw from in the space, and should have been able to truly stand on the shoulders of giants.
Instead they chose to omit legs from their atrocious avatars and not give anyone any reason to use it over existing services.
Zuck is a moron that can't accept "You are a moron" as an answer.
So... did the avatars ever get real legs, or no?
I am so glad this product is failing/failed, and I find myself truly and existentially rooting for the glasses with the cameras to die a similar fate.
I have so many questions about the overarching product vision of Meta and can't help but think they're going to continue to struggle with everything that isn't "serve more relevant ads on Instagram."
Anecdote: my most vivid memory of their "VR vision" is virtual versions of Mark and another exec high-fiving in front of a flooded Puerto Rico. Classy.
Somewhat related, Meta recently introduced SysPTW which is basically frame generation for the Quest:
> We’re introducing System Positional TimeWarp (SysPTW) from Depth-From-Stereo to Quest headsets. PTW uses real-time scene depth to reduce visual judder and lag when apps drop frames, making movement in VR smoother and more comfortable. [...] You can expect a more stable experience, especially in demanding social and gaming apps.
The "demanding social apps" they aren't naming here is almost certainly VRChat which is poorly optimized on the Quest.
I am a bit late to this thread, nevertheless, I wanted to put my thoughts down as well.
Horizon Worlds and the Metaverse were both pitched as a "social" platform. And this in itself is where I believe they went wrong. It fundamentally differs from my limited experience with VR and its potential. I see VR as an "anti-social" platform rather than a "social" one - and I say this in a good way.
When I put on a VR headset, its as if I am shunning my current world. The experiences I find valuable in VR are the ones that elevate that feeling - imagine watching a basketball game courtside, or watching NASCAR while floating right above the track, or watching a live concert happening halfway across the world, or VR tourism (visiting different places anytime you want, from some breathtaking angles - my most memorable experience of this was a video on Angel Falls https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_tqK4eqelA), or even the classics like playing VR games and watching movies. I believe that they should have doubled down on providing a much richer "anti-social" experience.
You should give VRChat a try, the predecessor and more successful version of Horizon Worlds. Everything you described can arguably be done in VRChat WHILE not destroying the social aspect of it! It's really neato and VR is not even required, much less mandatory (but highly encouraged).
About time. I guess there are worse things Facebook could have spent their money on?
I remember saying to someone one day that while Facebook kind of seems to be going places with their VR hardware, their software division were just reinventing Nintendo Miis, but worse. Anyone who actually cared about doing VR social stuff were going to use VRChat, as that was a much better product.
Even then, if you just look at Facebook's VR hardware in a vacuum, sure, it got better, pretty good even, but not to the point of appealing beyond niche groups, i.e. VR gamers and people who use VRChat, and making VR appealing beyond those groups is a thing I don't think is going to happen.
I bought my son a Meta Quest headset and a second one for me to use while playing with him. Honestly, it kind of makes me sick when I use it. Will have to see if it gets any better the next time we play. I'm kind of lazy and just want to lie down when using it, but the last time I tried using it I had to stand up to be able to do whatever it was we were doing.
I was a VR developer from about 2014 to 2020 after many years in traditional video games.
The really sad thing about how VR evolved is that sim sickness was not taken seriously as a barrier for mass adoption. Too many devs and players cast it aside as a "them" problem. "They" couldn't handle it. "They" didn't have VR legs.
The bottom line is that most things that became popular in VR were violating the rules which prevented sim sickness. This was a self-fulfilling prophecy that led the VR world into a corner.
I'm hopeful that Valve will be better stewards of VR in the long run, once Meta shuts down its hardware division, which you know is coming in the next couple years.
The problem is that freer movement is more immersive and it’s that free movement that really increases the immersion, and immersion is the product that VR is selling over monitors. I do agree it’s a market limiting problem, but there’s only so many beat sabers and shooting galleries that can lock you in place and still deliver that.
I tried the first Oculus dev kit in 2013 and got instant motion sickness after a short session.
Tried some fancy Quest headset more than a decade later, and same thing.
It's crazy that after spending like $100 billion in the space they still haven't been able to remove the most fundamental barriers to entry.
Apparently you will get used to it over time, I'm still on the getting used to it phase after a couple months.
Though I usually only play around with it on weekends.
I've noticed sitting and playing a cockpit game is more uncomfortable than standing and playing an fps (with teleport movement).
> Apparently you will get used to it over time, I'm still on the getting used to it phase after a couple months.
I think this is one of the reasons VR is niche. You are not going to see mass adoption of a product where you need to get used to physical discomfort in order to properly use it. The use case is not compelling enough to enough people to get over that.
At what point does this company un-do their name change to Meta?
They should’ve gone with “Matrix”.
That way they could transition from vr world (the old hype) to AI controlled dystopia (the new hype) with just a cool reveal, no name change needed.
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That was about Horizon Worlds on the hardware or platform or whatever, not the HW "place" itself, no?
Is it even possible to connect to HW without a Meta/Oculus headset?
It would appear that the Metaverse (as envisioned by Meta) was nothing more than a way to "grow" when there was no other reasonable path. It was a solution to this problem and this problem alone. Nobody wanted it.
Then AI comes along and offers real growth opportunity. But of course, Meta fumbled that one out of the gate because they are more interested in winning than in actually offering anything of value. So they figured they could sabotage the whole thing by open sourcing Llama. Then they got steamrolled by everyone actually creating value for people instead of following their tried and true parasite model.
No tech company in this era has been more destructive to society than Meta. Their utter lack of principles has led them down this path. Ironically the most value they have generated is to their investors and especially their employees who are all wealthy now, funded with advertising dollars from across the economy.
How would the sabotage-by-open-sourcing strategy have worked?
By giving away a viable product to steal the revenue stream from OpenAI in hopes they'd die on the vine. To draw developer attention towards them and take ownership of a thriving ecosystem like a honeypot so they could bait and switch them towards some kind of perverse ad-driven nightmare once they were dependent on them. You know, the standard Zuck playbook.
It's funny that Horizon Worlds will shut down before its actual launch here. Meta Quest headsets are sold here but the Horizon Worlds part of the OS was entirely blocked off. (The mobile app shows it, but I could never get the headset to navigate anywhere, just stuck in the homeworld lobby)
What is "here" in this context?
Metaverse, of course. Same here.
I was surprised by how may VR games I played and how many hours I put into it once I got a headset.
That being said I still think VR will always be a niche thing. We had VR headsets decades ago, aimed at the kind of person who builds a full cockpit setup at home for playing extremely nerdy flight sims. Now things are amazing if you're one of those people but I dont see VR ever being truly popular.
I honestly think VR hasn't taken off yet because every VR headset since forever has been a locked-down platform or not a stand-alone device (meaning: You need a powerful PC to use it, which makes the cost too high for casual players). The development barrier to entry is far too high and the market far too small.
The Steam Frame is a full PC that doesn't require a tether. I think it'll change everything if it doesn't cost a fortune (which it might). The possibilities for 3rd party hardware and the open ecosystem of a complete Linux distro + Steam are endless.
Day one of the Steam Frame I'm sure we're going to see all sorts of open source tools/scripts that make it better. Then 3rd party hardware will be announced and suddenly everyone's going to want one because all those things together make it sooooo nice.
I thought so too about the steam frame. Then I saw the pass through was not good. Pass through for me has made these products so more livable. It was downright shocking how much less isolating it felt to have full color pass through.
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So are they no longer making headsets then? Did I waste $500? Can I still use the one I have with steam games?
No, yes, yes.
And there was much shareholder rejoicing...
I am fine with this but I wished they didn't also shut down hyperlapse sharing feature. That sucks!
counterpoint: this assumes everyone has the same constraints. not always true
This was all a money laundering scheme right?
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Damn... I just planned to buy a new quest...
I have a Quest 3 and I think I've only opened Horizon Worlds once. It's a very small part of the overall offering. If you can find a used headset for $200, it's a no brainer buy
I mean, the device is still being sold and it's not like you are missing out on anything, unless you are one of the 3 people on the planet who actually uses the "Metaverse". Most people use it for games, and it's fine.
wanted to sell adds in VR and didn't work so he kept selling adds in instagram
I imagined logging into Horizon Worlds one last time, and being the last person left: https://www.siliconsnark.com/goodbye-horizon-worlds/
This news is perfect fodder for slightly dystopian creative writing.
It is really amazing how bloated the reality labs division is. Triple layers of directors and VPs. They have been running this grift for years.
When interacting with them I was left wondering whether they were delusional.
But the explanation is simpler: they were just lying through their teeth to empire build.
Can you believe they even built their own game engine to replace Unity? So may layers of principal engineers, directors, etc. I’m sure it will be cancelled if it hasn’t been already.
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I actually think there's a huge number of people who want to do online social "world"/ "reality" -- just not without the "3D VR" art. I'm talking like old school MOOs and MUDs but modernized -- or something with a 2d "Zelda overworld" or "isometric" UI even. Something that is less literal, and more "use your imagination."
The immersive 3d stuff is "wizbang neat" to Zuckerberg and investors and gamers. But actually most "regular people" I know don't actually like being "in" such environments. Some people get dizzy and sick. Some people don't like dissociating from the "real" world like that, even for simple 3d games. Some people are visually disabled. Or just don't enjoy the modality.
But more than anything, no matter what, it's always awkward in its immersion and people's imaginations will always be far richer than the uncanny and limited simulated "3d" world that a computer can deliver. Even if you had 99% fidelity, it'll still be a poor simulacrum that often leaves you feeling poorer.
I think Zuckerberg completely misread what his own customer base / world audience wanted because of his own generational biases growing up with technical "lawnmower man" fantasies and fiction, and a misplaced philosophical bias where he believes transcendent, progressive technology leading inevitably in this direction. Because that's what the 1990s and early 2000s was pushing in gaming and other tech. Having billions of dollars at his disposal, and brought up to want and see this future, he saw it as both inevitable and something that he could be pushing the forefront of.
Yes people want to connect with other people in online social spaces. And I think they're probably very excited to do so in a manner which models the thing/place/object aspect of the "real world" rather than the glorified magazine / bulletin board which is Facebook. Especially if they can create and author and extend that world from within.
But I don't think they want to strap facehuggers to their face and do that in simulated three dimensions. And I don't think it's necessary to do the latter to get the former.
(But I'm biased, I've been trying to rebuild the magic I found in LambdaMOO in various forms ... for the last 30 years... https://timbran.org/moor.html )
I read the first four words of the title and got my hopes up.
Comment was deleted :(
Time to pick another name for the company.
“AI” yep, that’s the new name
All 20 participants are going to be severely disappointed.
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Crafted by Rajat
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