Comment by ChrisRR
7 hours ago
I think VR would be completely dead by now if Meta weren't continuing to lose billions every quarter on it. Not many companies can endless sink that much money into a product
7 hours ago
I think VR would be completely dead by now if Meta weren't continuing to lose billions every quarter on it. Not many companies can endless sink that much money into a product
On the contrary, if Meta didn't acquire Oculus which hadn't poached Valve staff maybe the Steam Frame would have been out years ago.
It wouldn't have been touted at the "metaverse" and a revolution of having business meeting in a virtual room... looking like a boring office and maybe it would "just" be millions of gamers, but to stay we are in a better state because of Meta is questionable.
They did invest a ton and their products (if one can manage to make abstraction why they even exist in the first place) are actually well done but the line their brought on the entire industry created unrealistic expectation.
Is it good, is it bad, I'm not actually sure but I'm rather confident to say it's not obvious.
Meta burned all that money because Zuckerberg had just read something related to Snow Crash, not because he had a good idea for how to develop the sector.
I think for now games are the best use of VR, and Valve actually care about games, and Zuckerberg moving on to the next shiny thing leaves room for Valve to join Sony and Microsoft for the next PlayStation/XBox alternative.
If anything, when the Oculus Quest became the Meta Quest, it started feeling like regression rather than progress, with the games going from "wow!" to "did they port a phone game?".
Counterpoint: there are plenty of companies making VR hardware but they all remain niche and struggle because they can’t subsidize their hardware by taking both losses and user data as part of the price. Meta are better at killing competition more than they are at innovating.
Valve has annual profits in the billions, they invest in the future of VR too.
I am not so sure about that. When it felt like Meta was abandoning the space we saw some resurgence of smaller projects that tried to innovate, but if you have a big player sucking out all the oxygen you can't build smaller scale projects
Unfortunately a couple of small start ups isn't enough to carry the industry. Even big players like Valve who have more money in the bank to take a hit couldn't bring their headset in below $1000
Valve never sells at a loss. A significant slice of that is probably the RAM and storage, even at scale.
Nonsense. VR was and still is sustainable as a profitable niche product for specific use-cases. Zuck spending billions to try and own a new mass market category has nothing to do with that.