Unbelievable. They re-architected the whole operating system around this stupid app. They discontinued their previous homescreen environments in favor of trying to promote Horizon Worlds, only to discontinue the blasted thing anyway? After all of those millions of dollars spent trying to make virtual events happen?
While simultaneously renaming the VR headsets to also use Meta branding instead of Oculus, even though Oculus was a great brand and the most recognizable name in the VR industry. What made it worse is that by that point they'd produced lots of headsets with Oculus branding, including an Oculus button on one of the controllers. So, they had to change that button to also have a different logo and name, and have the software presumably recognize which revision you had to draw the correct controller model in the VR view. It's insane how far they went in pursuit of what they saw as the next NFTs.
IIRC the reason they abandoned Oculus brand was that Palmer Luckey sold the company with condition the Oculus headsets would not need a facebook account to use it. Later they renamed the company and headset, and would you look at that — it requires meta account now.
I think the Oculus Quest 2 was the first one to release with a Facebook requirement, but it was still Oculus-branded. It was this headset that they swapped out the branding on when they renamed themselves to Meta. Earlier models still have the Oculus logo on them and the controllers, despite being as locked-down as all the others. The rebrand came much later than the account requirement.
Oculus had pizzaz and nice branding separation from Facebook. Which was a good thing.
Meta does not feel like a different brand from Facebook, given it is its umbrella. As brands they both speak "surveillance", "advertising", "scams", "AI slop", "manipulating your experience", "child harms" and "doom scroll regret".
They should rebrand the headsets back to Oculus, put them in a separate division, remove any dependencies. And never speak of Meta This or Facebook That or Zuckavatraphila again.
Thank god Mark Zuckerberg is not self aware in the least bit because we can keep getting hilarious gems like this for probably the rest of his days. The guy probably lives as close to the Truman Show experience as one can realistically get.
Hah, you made me think of the future with regards to this fool. Why do I see a future where amongst all the chaos and destruction of a big climate-induced disaster, the headline "Mark Zuckerberg and his family have reportedly retreated into his doomsday bunker" will appear...
I thought the bunker is only a rumor, but DDGing it, it's "rumor" that's been covered in many news outlets, so, I'm guessing it's real although the news outlets might have some details wrong.
They changed the name of the company to distance themselves from a number of scandals including Cambridge Analytica, COVID vaccine misinformation, and sitting on studies about teen mental health and social media use.[0]
VR games are actually kind of neat and fun. But it’s too much of a hassle to set the thing up every time and, I dunno, the association with Facebook is too icky.
It would have been really interesting to see what Oculus could have become without getting bought. I do think they were a little neat idea, not at all ready for Facebook sized projects.
With modern inside out tracking headsets (basically camera based SLAM) the setup us none to minimal (clear up some space on the ground so you don't trip over things if not playing seated).
When I was 20, I preordered a pixel 2 after watching the launch presentation from my university library. One of the "bonuses" for doing so was Google's new headset you put your phone in for a VR experience, along with a new controller.
This "Daydream" only lasted a few years (in software support), but it was a pretty good physical implementation of the "strap your phone to your face for budget VR" concept. I used it more than I'd care to admit for watching movies on a virtual big screen. It'd always give me a big headache between the eyes after an hour and a half, but it was fun every now and again.
A day at the fair.
It even convinced me to buy an Oculus CV1 when those were being heavily discounted!
I never ended up using the CV1 as much as my Daydream, which is saying something. The appeal of VR just isn't that great to me. It's something I find myself wanting to do maybe once or twice a year. Now, never, since the CV1 only ever worked well with Windows, and I can't be bothered to keep a Windows install exclusively for VR (I've tried and failed multiple times with the Linux runtimes).
Not nearly enough drive to deal with base stations, wires, or controllers. And even with the newest headsets that do away with all those, not worth the cash or effort to put on, or the space the headset takes up. Not for "once a month" trips to the fair.
It's insane to me that Meta dumped so much cash into VR. Their fever dream of working in VR gives me a sense of dread and migraine just thinking about it...
If this were remotely true, there wouldn't have huge layoff rounds. The opposite is true: they hire thousands upon thousands of people and teach them how to build scalable software, and then set them loose. I'm frankly surprised by the lack of competition, but I suppose that's gated at multiple levels (visas, personal risk, funding, network effects, etc)
> Don't they screen to hire people who already know that?
There was a time when big tech widely hired dor entry-level jobs.
Also, cramming for the design portion of an interview, and doing it for real, and interacting with the architects/design documents are 2 very different things
> So, a fraction of the AI investments? It’s pretty clear where the focus is bow and who/what no longer has a future at Meta.
And the tens of billions spent on AI at Meta... As a result, we're all using "Meta Code CLI" and "ChatBook" and "Geminizuck" right?
Seriously: while we're all on Claude Code using the Anthropic models and many are happy with Gemini and ChatGPT for other stuff, where is Meta's AI offering? I love their Segment Anything Models (SAM) but what the heck has Meta to answer to Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and xAI?
Do they need one do you think? They are trying to make one for sure but it's interesting to think about whether they actually need their own models to survive the shift. Maybe they just deliver other people's models via Meta products?
The usage numbers probably reflect what happened in this house: since the pestering to confirm age and the horizon worlds update the Meta VR devices have literally not been recharged.
They had the foundation of something half reasonable at one point, but their product management clearly got in the way.
I think that's the issue Meta had, they were trying to introduce VR to the greater public. VRs actual community is a niche of individuals who love the technology, they didn't want what Horizon was offering. VRChat is too weird for the average person, but Horizon was not interesting enough for the average person either.
I do believe that the recent Meta headsets pulled in a lot of users who will stay, thanks to their price point and performance.
Interesting, cutting way back in the product they renamed the whole company for.
They feel a bit directionless to me. They are still making money but even their AI attempt feels half hearted. I think they are really trying but I’m not sure they can build the engineering muscle to move in new areas with the brand damage they’ve sustained.
The Meta/Oculus bet was never about VR or gaming. It is to solve Zuck's greatest fear of being beholden to platforms controlled by others. What it was supposed to be was basically what Microsoft missed out on with mobile, losing to Google and Apple. VR and AR could be that next platform to own and control. They would love to have all the data that Google and Apple enjoy. That's what Quest -> Horizon was about, change a gaming device into a mainstream entertainment and work-friendly one. This is all driven out of fear and lack of control. It would suck for them if OpenAI owns the most successful personal AI device.
I still find it funny that Apple did exactly the usual Apple thing of coming in way later and yet inventing a UX for this kind of stuff good enough that Meta immediately started scrambling to copy it.
Having a baked in hardware userbase and dev team helps a lot. The hardest part of inventing new things is getting feedback from real people who really think deeply about this stuff, who also have lots of power within the company to say no.
I was at Intel for a while and there was one glaring problem - they have one product that spins off a huge amount of cash. This means a few things: First, that one product is really where the things that matter happen. But second, they have all this money and they don't know what to do with it, they can't spend it all on their core product because that looks terrible - they're already throwing off money, investing more probably just makes your company look bad (you're spending more to get the same revenue). SO instead you have to take that money and make bets. But not just any bets. You need a bet that (a) matters if it pays off, and (b) looks favourable compared to the core business. So you buy Mcafee and Altera and MobilEye, 5G was the future once...
So to take the Meta example, they need something that is going to have revenue upside similar to Meta advertising revenue (one of the most profitable things in the universe), and that has better margins that the advertising business (basically impossible).So the only logical thing to do is to make grotesquely large bets on things that are extremely speculative. You can't bet on things that are well known - because nothing known has the properties from earlier that you're looking for, and you can't bet small because you've got to convince people you're the pay off is of a similar size to your existing business.
In Intel's case they lost focus on the core business and so that died and their other bets didn't matter because the core business was dead. With Meta the core business in't dead, but it's only a matter of time before it's seriously threatened and so they're going to attack that threat with everything they've got - and they have a tonne of resources.
But Google actually knows how to do research and how to apply it to products. Meta's AI research hasn't produced anywhere near as many state of the art products /revolutionary achievements.
I was thinking more of their primary revenue source / money printer being their ads business like Meta then they also spend billions from it on all kinds of other bets.
In 2026 we need to update our mental model of Google. Google has been wildly successful at adding diversification. Around 40% of Google’s profit (depending on the quarter) comes from non-search income.
They build a wildly successful cloud platform, they’re expanding their subscription services, they’ve got enterprise offerings, etc
The trick is that Google accepted that none of their other business would likely have the margins and volume that search has, but they did it anyways.
They already attacked it with everything they've got lmao
As in, in 2012. They outright replaced people's email addresses in their profile (makes it harder to reach people outside the walled garden, makes it harder to transfer your credentials to a competing service) and I've heard Google+ links got blocked
Zuckerberg is many things, not everything he's accused of (Trump/Cambridge Analytica) might be entirely accurate but he is at least partly a bit of a scumbag
> Interesting, cutting way back in the product they renamed the whole company for.
It was clearly the wrong bet. He pumped something like $100B into the endeavour (Meta Quest / VR / Horizons) and it is just slowly dying as we speak. He has to give up on it, although I am sure it will be called a "pivot" into AR glasses.
> He pumped something like $100B into the endeavour (Meta Quest / VR / Horizons) and it is just slowly dying as we speak.
Literally never met anyone who used or liked the Horizon thing, VRChat in comparison is more popular and doesn't feel like a soulless corporate husk: they also have quite the variety of worlds, from party games, to someone building a whole jet/chopper flight combat simcade world; ofc all of them are a bit jank, but lots of cool stuff and very expressive avatars.
Meta Quest, on the other hand, seems like a really good piece of tech - I still have my Quest 2 (because I'm broke as hell), but I enjoyed even that one, albeit maybe with a slightly more comfy head strap than the default one and the Virtual Desktop app cause their Link app doesn't support Intel Arc GPUs. The tracking is good, the experience of all sorts of stuff in VR is nice, games like H3VR or VTOL VR are great, as is Into The Radius VR! At the same time, I can see why it never saw super widespread adoption - tricky to develop for and also a somewhat limited audience.
Also the productivity situation just isn't there, closest I got to a good productivity setup (out of curiosity) was the Immersed app before they messed it all up by removing support for physical monitors - I could have my 4 physical monitors in VR surrounded by whatever I want and some virtual monitors and just lock in, it was kind of zen despite the technical limitations. It seems like people got promising tech in place... and then never really wrote good software to take advantage of it. Even Virtual Desktop has artificially enforced monitor limits in VR.
I hope VR tech continues to progress (especially lightweight headsets) no matter what happens to Meta.
Yeah, it was a bizarre decision. There isn't a clear ROI on games and that's what Horizon Worlds has been the whole time. There's no equation that says a 100M game automatically makes 100x more than a 1M game on average. If anything the equation is sub-linear. 100B just doesn't seem like the right size for a game investment.
It's supposed to be a Roblox competitor, which does print money, though probably not to the extent of how much they invested.
The problems are 2 fold:
People/kids don't want to put on a VR headset to play Roblox. I guess they're conceding this point by pivoting to mobile.
Meta is the opposite of cool. Real name requirements, only humanoid avatars, super corpo branding, etc really seriously hold them back from competing with VRChat or Roblox. This one is terminal it'll never be fixable as long as Meta is at the helm.
There are some really good ar glasses for a couple of hundred dollars, I think they are going to end up really cheap and not the 100 billion investment that facebook needs.
Tbf I don't think they ever intended to make back their investments via the goggles. As near as I can tell the thought process was basically: "Real estate + fashion + live entertainment + art + etc is X quadrillion dollars. We could make The Virtual World and capture all that value. It would be irrational not to invest $100B!" Basically Pascal's Investment.
I'd like to think that the top minds working on AI have a higher purpose than to get the next generation hooked to a digital morphine drip. Serving soap cutting videos and giving teen girls body dysmorphia isn't a very compelling mission.
Though I'm sure many are mercenaries and will work for whoever pays the most.
>I'd like to think that the top minds working on AI have a higher purpose than to get the next generation hooked to a digital morphine drip.
That's the irony. The genius scientists are against AI used for defense, but somehow they're all-in for AI being used to getting people addicted to ads, dopamine, gambling, debt, porn, political manipulation, etc. basically everything that's guarantee to wreck society, but thank god they aren't making weapons I guess.
Can we all say a big thank you to Neal Stephenson for inspiring Zuckerberg to light tens of billions of dollars on fire in this stupid quest? Imagine what kinds of anticompetitive acquisitions or further privacy-invading tech they might’ve spent that on instead.
It makes sense to rebrand anyway, because I'm sure they don't want people to only think of "that social media site" for all of their other ventures. Just like Google rebranding as alphabet
I think for Google the more meaningful other brands are the actual product ones, like Waymo, Nest, YouTube, Calico, Verily. Those are the ones that benefit from being able to distance themselves a bit from being "a Google company" and all the baggage that comes with that, eg an assumption that it'll be shuttered at some point, will pivot massively into ads, whatever.
I don't think Meta has nearly that need. It's "other companies" are Instagram and Whatsapp, which are basically in the exact same space as Facebook.
I don't think Google really "rebranded" in the same kind of way, since Google is still their brand across the vast majority of their product offerings and the signs on Google offices still say Google. Seems like the Alphabet thing is more about letting the "other bets" be under a higher umbrella, and possibly other reasons related to financial engineering etc.
The rebrand came at a time when "Facebook" was mainly associated with either tremendous scandal (Facebook Files, ad fraud, Cambridge Analytica, Rohingya and Tigray genocides, etc.) or a social media platform increasingly dominated by the elderly.
I think it was a desperate lunge away from that toxic brand toward ANYTHING else. Zuckerberg put his money on VR, given the pandemic and the mild success of Oculus.
Betting big on the metaverse in particular was a mistake, but it might have helped keep the Facebook stink off of products like WhatsApp and Instagram, which remain pretty popular among mainstream audiences.
The sign of a company in absolute decline is when the worst possible place to get info about it, is their official announcement. Whoever wrote the announcement went out of their way to obfuscate the crux of the announcement (compare the clear heading on hackernews to their own heading)
If your (well paid) job is to write and communicate clearly, and for a major announcement you come up with this...not much left to say.
Despite the shock at the amount of money meta spent on their version of the metaverse, I don't think they spent nearly enough to accomplish their vision.
Meta, to the detriment of the market, tried too early in the VR lifecycle to own the market. They basically tried to become the iPhone and Apple in the year 1990.
Tell me, do you believe any singular company in the year 1990, with 100B to burn, would be able to create the iPhone, in any of its varations? Absolutely not, there too much research, too much to invent, too much to program and not nearly enough talent and money for one company to manage.
I think you make a good point but also, honestly, VR seemed so beyond Facebook's depth. Zuck, IMO, was reaching for a pie on a table at the other end of the room. I understand the whole point of acquiring Oculus was to get allies on that table at the other end but---excuse my corpo-speak here---I don't think Oculus ever had synergy with the rest of Facebook's business.
This is just my 2c as an outside observer, software engineer ofc. I'm sure some MBA could make a case for said synergy. But it made sense to acquire Instagram and WhatsApp, for instance, because they'd face similar tech challenges and could benefit from each others' growth playbooks. But Oculus?!?!?! IMO Facebook had a better chance opening a cloud computing division.
So, achieving the Metaverse dream with the money Zuck has spent was always gonna be a tall order at this point but if anyone could've made it work, it wasn't gonna be a social media company.
> because they'd face similar tech challenges and could benefit from each others' growth playbooks
Another point of view: antitrust. What Zuck did with Whatsapp at a minimum ought to be highly illegal. He's a black hat hacker from his history and WA is more of the same. Brian Acton said "it's time, delete Facebook". That's not mutual benefit, that's conquering
On the hardware side, sure, not being able to solve the hardware challenges always seemed like a real possibility.
On the gaming side though, other companies succeeded in making profitable games. Meta seems to have just spent and spent, without getting a game people wanted to play.
They did though! From what I understand from people who made those profitable games is that Facebook funded, either though investments or grants most vr games out there. Even ones not owned by the company (like beat sabre, batman, deadpool, etc).
The problem is, like someone else mentioned, the company itself. Facebook is a middleman company. other people make stuff, showcase it on one of their properties (insta, marketplace, whatever), and then go back to the people actually doing stuff.
VR seems cool but imo just sucks as a product no matter how it has been used. Like who is the market for? Gamers? They might be trying to play for the next 12 hours straight. They don't want to waive their arms around and turn their head.
Nongamers? And you are going to somehow get nongamers to shell out for the required hardware for this casual half interest pursuit of theirs? Doesn't work.
I feel like zuck has been billionaire for too long to probably understand this.
I met some of my best friends in VR, and had life-changing social interactions in some VR games on the Oculus platform... Especially EchoVR. I'm still a true believer in VR as a medium. It'll go mainstream one day, and there will be a Meta-sized company built upon it.
They had lightning in a bottle and somehow lost it. Honestly it might have been hiring Carmack that sent them down this path. Moving away from PCVR expanded the market, but it also killed the magic. Now the quest store is a wasteland of what look like low budget mobile apps.
It’s wild how much mismanagement Zuck is able to get away with just because he controls majority voting shares in Meta. At this point all of the missteps by the company in AR/VR, AI and everything else can directly be traced back to him. Half-baked vision, massive spending and no accountability. The company desperately needs a Sundar/Satya type leader.
Yea, we're all lucky that the company is so badly managed and lacks vision and execution. If they were visionary, competent and effective, Meta products would be an even bigger menace and more destructive than they already are.
At the end of the day the core business is throwing off tonnes of money and is run fine. Would it be better not to throw billions at the next cool thing? Who knows. Probably. But Google does the same thing and they've actually built some cool stuff.
Oh no, those poor people who are happy to get paid making products and services to exploit our basest emotions, amp them for "engagement", subverting civility and democracy in the meanwhile, are going to be laid off?!
It's baffling to me how much they juiced up this platform on Horizon OS, and now they're just axing it from there entirely. Millions if not billions of dollars gone to waste. At least I won't have to see it in the UI anymore, I guess. How does this even happen?
Zuck has become a very rich man avoiding all the obvious and expected outcomes. When Facebook stock hit its low a few years ago, HN was explaining why it was doomed. The man has founder mentality at the helm of a trillion-dollar company. It is no wonder he is what he is.
The stock lows was a market overreaction, and it corrected itself soon after. It’s not like Zuck got the company out of the hole by making some genius moves. Quite the opposite. Meta would be in an equally good or better position today had Zuck just done nothing for the last decade.
They just used their war chest to buy a bunch of companies to diversify their revenue stream. It's not like Meta made some massively profitable innovations or new services.
In all seriousness, given component price increases etc, the Quest 3 remains an incredible deal for PC VR use. Aside from the foveated rendering, the lens/display specifications are very close to Valve's still to ship Steam Frame, which at this stage will almost certainly cost more than the Quest 3 does.
25 PPD VR headset for 499 with inside-out tracking plus controllers etc is amazing value. I've never once used any of the Meta applications, I only use it for VR games on Steam.
I think there is a case to be made one should buy one while you still can, if you want a great value PC VR headset. It's still an excellent choice for stuff like sim racing as well.
I also think the Quest line of hardware is done for. They are clearly much more interested in the glasses lineup, products like the Ray Bans etc, none of which appear to use any of the Quest software stack.
Meta has very recently had leaks of an upcoming lightweight headset. So maybe not a Quest 4 as a direct successor to the Quest 3, but a new headset is in the works.
Rumor is it that the focus of this new headset is AR. Not VR.
So once again they're making a stupid business decision based on wishful thinking.
Exec 1: "Surely, people will want to wear this headset all day while they work! Because the only reason why anyone would NOT want to do that is the weight of the thing!"
Exec 2: "Exactly! Gaming makes us a lot of money—and it's the only reason anyone ever bought our VR headsets—but imagine how much more money we could be making from business customers/apps that currently have no need for such devices. If we build it, they will come though! Can there be any doubt?"
Exec 3: "Not to mention that the data we collect from gamers has almost no value! We need to be collecting intimate details about everyone's lives, not their best Beat Saber scores!"
Exec 4: "You know what? Let's get rid of the controllers entirely. Sure, they're absolutely 100% necessary for decent gaming but I seriously doubt the business applications of AR that we're pretending is a $100 billion market won't need it."
Exec 5: "I'm concerned that end users will be able to do what they want with OUR devices that we're so graciously selling them the privilege to use. We need to ensure they're NOT at all like generic PCs that allow anyone and everyone to run whatever software they want and attach 3rd party hardware. It's not like such capabilities of general purpose hardware were what set off the PC revolution or anything!"
Plenty of people use the 'cartoony' parts of VRChat and even have Quest devices entirely for it. The difference comes down to, well, VRChat just being the plain superior product in almost every regard, especially for social spaces, even after Meta set huge amounts of money on fire with Horizon Worlds.
They were trying to compete with an existing, VERY good couple of alternatives, and the people most actually likely to use that product were already on those services.
It was a losing play that didn’t know what market it was actually entering.
VRChat is the most popular one. Age verification. User generated models. User generated worlds. Revenue sharing in worlds. For-sale models and props. It’s quite feature rich now.
They're not all deranged! Some are completely productive, functional furries. Probably. Maybe.
Also, your statement is far too reductive! There's plenty of avatars with scales! Also, don't forget the anime girls that are actually middle-aged men and the occasional sentient burrito.
The suspiciously wealthy software developers, astronauts, pharmacists, game devs and artists that build high quality 3d models, Blender and Substance Painter tutorials and add-ons that prop up a good percentage of the VR headset market, Patreon market, and have a thriving artisan ecosystem?
> By March 31, 2026, Horizon Worlds and Events will no longer appear in the Store on Quest. Also, Horizon Central, Events Arena, Kaiju, and Bobber Bay worlds will no longer be available in VR. You can still jump into your other favorite worlds in VR until June 15, 2026, after which the Horizon Worlds app will be removed from Quest, and Worlds will no longer be available in VR.
I don't think that's entirely it, they don't want the product facebook is selling. VR Chat is massively more popular than Facebooks offerings.
Though Facebook had impossible goals, they didn't want to make a gaming device, they wanted to make the next smartphone, that everyday people and office workers would use. Which was just unrealistic.
I have to agree. Is it perfect? Hell no. Is it an insane value for the $250 I paid for my Quest 3s last year at Target? Hell yes.
My kids and I use our two headsets a lot. Sure, it's not a daily driver for workflows, but the uniqueness of many of the game experiences just can't be replicated on desktops/consoles.
It's a damn shame because Facebook bought up Oculus, poured gasoline on a fire by pumping $100B dollars in and now seems set to walk away because it didn't make a $100B + 1 dollars.
In its current state, it was never going to be a replacement for PCs or phone experiences. It's just a different lane all together. But Beat Saber, or Walkabout mini golf, or the I Expect You to Die series are insanely fun and unique. I'll be sad if they fold the quest down entirely, but I hope that Valve or others take up the banner. VR doesn't have to be a $100B industry to be viable, especially in its infancy.
Meanwhile, Apple tosses a $3,500 headset onto the market and then is surprised that it's treated as a novelty. Why is it so hard for these companies to get their strategies right? Maybe it's because it's not a product suited (today, at least) for two of the largest companies on earth to focus on. These are moonshot companies who make products that half of the globe uses on a daily basis.
I just want a solid VR platform with a healthy pipeline or quirky, interesting games.
FYI: This is usually solved by placing a fan on the floor in front of your boundary (designated play area). This isn't just a "community tip", it's been studied:
It's interesting, but this is the kind of barrier that makes Zuck's idea of everyone using VR all the time everywhere impossible. Putting a fan in the space is the kind of hack only someone highly motivated to play VR games would do, not someone who wants to do online shopping.
Yes, my understanding (and I suspect the reason why the airflow experiment worked) is that a large part of the reason this happens is because of a mismatch between the output from the vestibular and visual systems. So, the automated defenses of your body freak out and go into a defensive mode.
I think that ~30% of the population just has more sensitivity to the mismatch.
I also worry that the whole idea will die before it had a chance to truly blossom. It's really amazing as is and with higher resolution and better field of view it could be on another level altogether. I hope that Valve will keep the tocrch and I plan to get their VR glasses to support the industry.
I never understood why they were trying to recreate real life social interactions in VR, because it's worse by default, and the majority of the nerds who buy this tech are probably trying to escape that on some level. I know that any time I went into Meta Horizon Worlds, I didn't want to hear 95% of the people I heard talking.
What I do use VR for is Bigscreen VR nearly every night to watch stuff with my friends. Scrolling through reels in a movie theater is pretty fun and even though I never do it solo on my phone, I will sit there for like 3-4 hours in VR enjoying communal brain rot.
Perhaps they should focus on things like that instead of gimmicks that nobody cares about. For example, I have never once played a game in VR that didn't force me to sit or stand in a specific position, meaning to play it, I have to go out of my way to do so.
The last 10 years of the VR industry has been about trying to find users beyond the hardcore nerds who want to virtually meet up with friends every night or try out experiences/demos for more than a few days. The moment that hope goes away so do the tens of billions of investment as it was never really about finding out what that group of users wanted.
That was the point of Horizon Worlds. They were trying a (very expensive) social play for VR.
The problem is that the intersection/suitability of VR and social media is rather low, while as a counterexample the intersection of mobile and social media is very large. I have no desire to chat with old classmates when I "suit up" with VR goggles, I'm there to game.
If they mention it at all, it'll be in the context of the C-suite envy about the money being made with Fortnite skins and "virtual assets", resulting in galaxy brain ideas like "buy land in the metaverse" or "own rare art with NFTs".
VRChat also seems to be used only by niche perverts. Perhaps only niche perverts are currently interested in the Metaverse, and Horizon Worlds failed because it didn't cater to niche perverts.
I find it utterly fascinating how VR and 3D keep coming back in cycles every couple of decades, but ultimately fail to stick.
3D film was big in the 1950's, but fell out of fashion as colour film processes became cheaper and more ubiquitous. The 3D technology of the day couldn't handle colour film, and colour was a bigger leap forward in immersion than 3D. The 3D surge that happened a couple decades ago was in full-colour, but still subsided. Home video was on the rise, and the expense of 3D in the home was probably to blame, as well as half-baked solutions. I owned a 3D capable projector for a while, but it had to be run at a reduced refresh rate and took a big brightness hit in 3D mode. I watched 3D movies only a couple of times, and stuck to good old 2D after that. I no longer own a 3D capable display.
There was a big content problem with 3D movies. Some movies attempted to WOW you with 3D gimmicks. Scott Cameron's "Ghosts of the Abyss" was guilty of this. It was a mostly 2D documentary that occasionally rammed a robot arm in your face or had a collage of images popping out of the wall for no particular reason. The result was that you were more frequently distracted from the experience by 3D gimmicks than further immersed in it. Other films took the approach of making both 2D and 3D versions available, but this made 3D non-essential to the experience. 3D just didn't add much. I often found myself preferring the 2D version because so many cinemas have brightness problems with 3D projection.
VR was big in the 90's, mainly in VR Cafes. The technology was cool as hell in concept, but the reality was underwhelming. Computers of the day just weren't fast enough, and the results were literally nauseating. VR fell out of fashion, the cafes went out of business, and that was mostly it for VR until a few years ago. The current surge has much better hardware and far more compelling experiences. Valve's Alyx is just plain brilliant! Unfortunately, it's still nauseating for some and a truly civilized VR experience seems just beyond the capabilities of all but the most ridiculously expensive hardware at present. As a result, adoption is poor and the current wave of VR is petering out, like 3D did a decade or so ago. There aren't many VR headsets out there, so there isn't a lot of compelling software, so there isn't a lot of reason for more people to buy expensive headsets, and so on.
For my money, the problem is that VR and 3D aren't as big a leap forward as they need to be in order to justify by their current expense and downsides. People can use their imagination to immerse themselves through a 2D window really effectively. VR probably isn't going to catch on until it's cheap and trouble-free. Eventually, it'll be better/cheaper at delivering a big 2D window than a physical 2D screen can, but it's probably not going to succeed until then.
As a thought experiment, they probably helped the world global happiness more by burning $100B rather than just sitting on a massive cash hoard as so many tech companies enjoy doing. Sitting in their coffers it was doing nothing. At least this way, it went to a whole bunch of individuals, manufacturing startups, etc. And theoretically many of those recipients spent some of it.
I'm not saying it wasn't wasted spend, but velocity of money is a thing and maybe it's better off in the hands of the people who it was spent on instead of sitting in Zuck's war chest.
Can I just remind people what Facebook the company is responsible for? And I'm not talking about Myanmar and so on and so forth and I'm not talking about them as a VR entity. People miss posts all the time because the algorithm won't show it to them, even from close friends. People had accumulated "Other" inbox messages for years, that they were never told about. And so on. "Helping the world global happiness" was never a priority
So, simply redirecting their spending in that division would instantly propel Meta to be the biggest medical researcher in the world. And as a bonus they’d get a real return out of it.
It was terrible, and frankly the only way I see it getting to where it got is by upper management keeping their fingers in their ears and their eyes shut.
Maybe I'm just naive but I don't really understand discontinuing things like this. Like, unless there are like 100 people using this, how can it not be possible to just leave this running at like 0.5% of its former capacity. Just leave up like 1 server, collapse all of the DBs into one, and let these few autists have their stuff.
It probably distracts from the AI race. With the newly bought political power it makes far more sense for Meta to align with whatever this administration seeks. And it’s not gaming or VR.
At a minimum, the app needs updates to handle breakages caused by OS updates. It needs moderators and other staff for legal reasons since Meta is large enough that there's always a significant liability risk for even a few users. It needs to interact with the main non-VR app unless they want to fully isolate it. Etc.
When I was at Google, I had many of these discussions about cost tradeoffs for products that were https://killedbygoogle.com/
Unbelievable. They re-architected the whole operating system around this stupid app. They discontinued their previous homescreen environments in favor of trying to promote Horizon Worlds, only to discontinue the blasted thing anyway? After all of those millions of dollars spent trying to make virtual events happen?
They also renamed the entire corporation from "Facebook" to "Meta" to prove how serious they were about it.
While simultaneously renaming the VR headsets to also use Meta branding instead of Oculus, even though Oculus was a great brand and the most recognizable name in the VR industry. What made it worse is that by that point they'd produced lots of headsets with Oculus branding, including an Oculus button on one of the controllers. So, they had to change that button to also have a different logo and name, and have the software presumably recognize which revision you had to draw the correct controller model in the VR view. It's insane how far they went in pursuit of what they saw as the next NFTs.
Funnily enough, it did end up as the next NFTs, just not in the way they hoped
IIRC the reason they abandoned Oculus brand was that Palmer Luckey sold the company with condition the Oculus headsets would not need a facebook account to use it. Later they renamed the company and headset, and would you look at that — it requires meta account now.
I think the Oculus Quest 2 was the first one to release with a Facebook requirement, but it was still Oculus-branded. It was this headset that they swapped out the branding on when they renamed themselves to Meta. Earlier models still have the Oculus logo on them and the controllers, despite being as locked-down as all the others. The rebrand came much later than the account requirement.
Oculus had pizzaz and nice branding separation from Facebook. Which was a good thing.
Meta does not feel like a different brand from Facebook, given it is its umbrella. As brands they both speak "surveillance", "advertising", "scams", "AI slop", "manipulating your experience", "child harms" and "doom scroll regret".
They should rebrand the headsets back to Oculus, put them in a separate division, remove any dependencies. And never speak of Meta This or Facebook That or Zuckavatraphila again.
Thank god Mark Zuckerberg is not self aware in the least bit because we can keep getting hilarious gems like this for probably the rest of his days. The guy probably lives as close to the Truman Show experience as one can realistically get.
Hah, you made me think of the future with regards to this fool. Why do I see a future where amongst all the chaos and destruction of a big climate-induced disaster, the headline "Mark Zuckerberg and his family have reportedly retreated into his doomsday bunker" will appear...
I thought the bunker is only a rumor, but DDGing it, it's "rumor" that's been covered in many news outlets, so, I'm guessing it's real although the news outlets might have some details wrong.
Now, that might just be the decoy bunker. :)
Now they have to rebrand the company again to be about some AI hype spy glasses. The Metaverse was a flop.
Don't worry, they'll rename themselves LLaMeBook next, and this time will be different!
They changed the name of the company to distance themselves from a number of scandals including Cambridge Analytica, COVID vaccine misinformation, and sitting on studies about teen mental health and social media use.[0]
[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-59083601
Billions. Facebook has spent billions and billions over the past decade in VR. Starting with the Oculus merger and then in 2021 with the rebrand.
10 billion a year supposedly for the past 5 years now.
I kept saying to myself, they must be seeing something I'm not... I guess not
VR games are actually kind of neat and fun. But it’s too much of a hassle to set the thing up every time and, I dunno, the association with Facebook is too icky.
It would have been really interesting to see what Oculus could have become without getting bought. I do think they were a little neat idea, not at all ready for Facebook sized projects.
With modern inside out tracking headsets (basically camera based SLAM) the setup us none to minimal (clear up some space on the ground so you don't trip over things if not playing seated).
As I've heard and said elsewhere -- VR Games are absolutely like a day at the fair. But no one wants to go to the fair EVERY DAY.
This is a fantastic way of putting it.
When I was 20, I preordered a pixel 2 after watching the launch presentation from my university library. One of the "bonuses" for doing so was Google's new headset you put your phone in for a VR experience, along with a new controller.
This "Daydream" only lasted a few years (in software support), but it was a pretty good physical implementation of the "strap your phone to your face for budget VR" concept. I used it more than I'd care to admit for watching movies on a virtual big screen. It'd always give me a big headache between the eyes after an hour and a half, but it was fun every now and again.
A day at the fair.
It even convinced me to buy an Oculus CV1 when those were being heavily discounted!
I never ended up using the CV1 as much as my Daydream, which is saying something. The appeal of VR just isn't that great to me. It's something I find myself wanting to do maybe once or twice a year. Now, never, since the CV1 only ever worked well with Windows, and I can't be bothered to keep a Windows install exclusively for VR (I've tried and failed multiple times with the Linux runtimes).
Not nearly enough drive to deal with base stations, wires, or controllers. And even with the newest headsets that do away with all those, not worth the cash or effort to put on, or the space the headset takes up. Not for "once a month" trips to the fair.
It's insane to me that Meta dumped so much cash into VR. Their fever dream of working in VR gives me a sense of dread and migraine just thinking about it...
"The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand."
- All The President's Men
Sometimes it’s just a jobs program to keep people busy so that they can’t build something else that can threaten your business
If this were remotely true, there wouldn't have huge layoff rounds. The opposite is true: they hire thousands upon thousands of people and teach them how to build scalable software, and then set them loose. I'm frankly surprised by the lack of competition, but I suppose that's gated at multiple levels (visas, personal risk, funding, network effects, etc)
It was true. Then they needed money for other things and whole orgs get laid off.
>teach them how to build scalable software
Don't they screen to hire people who already know that?
> Don't they screen to hire people who already know that?
There was a time when big tech widely hired dor entry-level jobs.
Also, cramming for the design portion of an interview, and doing it for real, and interacting with the architects/design documents are 2 very different things
What's the quote:
"A billion here, a billion there and pretty soon you're talking about some real money."
So, a fraction of the AI investments? It’s pretty clear where the focus is bow and who/what no longer has a future at Meta.
> a fraction of the AI investments
you realize 99% of those announced "investments" have yet to occur as recognizable transactions, correct?
Meanwhile, the barrel of $70b in metaverse waste was actually spent
They already hold a lot of the debt for the AI investments, is my understanding. I guess they could pay it back and not spend it.
> So, a fraction of the AI investments? It’s pretty clear where the focus is bow and who/what no longer has a future at Meta.
And the tens of billions spent on AI at Meta... As a result, we're all using "Meta Code CLI" and "ChatBook" and "Geminizuck" right?
Seriously: while we're all on Claude Code using the Anthropic models and many are happy with Gemini and ChatGPT for other stuff, where is Meta's AI offering? I love their Segment Anything Models (SAM) but what the heck has Meta to answer to Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and xAI?
Do they need one do you think? They are trying to make one for sure but it's interesting to think about whether they actually need their own models to survive the shift. Maybe they just deliver other people's models via Meta products?
10 billion a year supposedly for the past 5 years now.
Imagine being able to solve world hunger, and then… not.
They could have just waited until AI came out, now they can spend $1 million on tokens and slop :)
I meant hundreds of millions on Horizon Worlds specifically. Virtual concerts and the like. Big "Hello Fellow Kids" energy.
Can you blame them? They saw the huge success Fortnite was having in that space.
Facebook's core competency is copying other successful products. Sometimes it works.
should have just bought epic then like they usually do
Indeed. Reportedly Epic was worth $31.5 billion in 2022. That's only ~1/3 what they spent on Metaverse.
The usage numbers probably reflect what happened in this house: since the pestering to confirm age and the horizon worlds update the Meta VR devices have literally not been recharged.
They had the foundation of something half reasonable at one point, but their product management clearly got in the way.
but their product management clearly got in the way
I'm pretty sure the buck stops with Mark Zuckerberg.
Zuckerberg wants a cyberpunk future, not some 3D immersive HR department on your face.
I think to him those are the same thing.
If he wanted an imaginative environment he'd be in VRChat.
VRChat is what you would point at to justify the creation of Horizon Worlds, while saying “it is just too creepy for normies”.
Neither of those extremes are tolerable.
And at the same time VRChat is reaching record popularity and user counts with tiny fraction of the budget Facebook wasted.
And it is so simple - just listen to your users and give them what they want - which seems to be VR cat girls.
I think that's the issue Meta had, they were trying to introduce VR to the greater public. VRs actual community is a niche of individuals who love the technology, they didn't want what Horizon was offering. VRChat is too weird for the average person, but Horizon was not interesting enough for the average person either.
I do believe that the recent Meta headsets pulled in a lot of users who will stay, thanks to their price point and performance.
> After all of those millions of dollars spent trying to make virtual events happen?
Billions. $70 billion since 2021 to be exact.
Mark isn’t in charge because he’s smart, he’s in charge because of voting rights.
They rebuilt half of their company around this thing and countless people saw promotions all around.
Not millions. Many many billions. (not on virtual events, but on the platform itself--that's the crazy part)
Interesting, cutting way back in the product they renamed the whole company for.
They feel a bit directionless to me. They are still making money but even their AI attempt feels half hearted. I think they are really trying but I’m not sure they can build the engineering muscle to move in new areas with the brand damage they’ve sustained.
The Meta/Oculus bet was never about VR or gaming. It is to solve Zuck's greatest fear of being beholden to platforms controlled by others. What it was supposed to be was basically what Microsoft missed out on with mobile, losing to Google and Apple. VR and AR could be that next platform to own and control. They would love to have all the data that Google and Apple enjoy. That's what Quest -> Horizon was about, change a gaming device into a mainstream entertainment and work-friendly one. This is all driven out of fear and lack of control. It would suck for them if OpenAI owns the most successful personal AI device.
I still find it funny that Apple did exactly the usual Apple thing of coming in way later and yet inventing a UX for this kind of stuff good enough that Meta immediately started scrambling to copy it.
Having a baked in hardware userbase and dev team helps a lot. The hardest part of inventing new things is getting feedback from real people who really think deeply about this stuff, who also have lots of power within the company to say no.
I was at Intel for a while and there was one glaring problem - they have one product that spins off a huge amount of cash. This means a few things: First, that one product is really where the things that matter happen. But second, they have all this money and they don't know what to do with it, they can't spend it all on their core product because that looks terrible - they're already throwing off money, investing more probably just makes your company look bad (you're spending more to get the same revenue). SO instead you have to take that money and make bets. But not just any bets. You need a bet that (a) matters if it pays off, and (b) looks favourable compared to the core business. So you buy Mcafee and Altera and MobilEye, 5G was the future once...
So to take the Meta example, they need something that is going to have revenue upside similar to Meta advertising revenue (one of the most profitable things in the universe), and that has better margins that the advertising business (basically impossible).So the only logical thing to do is to make grotesquely large bets on things that are extremely speculative. You can't bet on things that are well known - because nothing known has the properties from earlier that you're looking for, and you can't bet small because you've got to convince people you're the pay off is of a similar size to your existing business.
In Intel's case they lost focus on the core business and so that died and their other bets didn't matter because the core business was dead. With Meta the core business in't dead, but it's only a matter of time before it's seriously threatened and so they're going to attack that threat with everything they've got - and they have a tonne of resources.
Or you could just return the profits to shareholders.
Spending tens of billions on something that was never going to work is certainly meta.
Man, activist shareholders should really start demanding that companies return money to them rather than setting it on fire with vanity projects.
Sounds a lot like Google as well
But Google actually knows how to do research and how to apply it to products. Meta's AI research hasn't produced anywhere near as many state of the art products /revolutionary achievements.
> But Google actually knows how to do research and how to apply it to products.
I have seen basically no evidence of this. Google knows how to do research to create technology. Google is pretty terrible at creating product though.
Which is almost word for word the state Microsoft have been in for over 20 years.
To the point it was a running joke at MSR.
I'm not sure Microsoft is good at creating technology OR products. Microsoft is good at enterprise sales.
google knows how to do research, at any rate.
I was thinking more of their primary revenue source / money printer being their ads business like Meta then they also spend billions from it on all kinds of other bets.
In 2026 we need to update our mental model of Google. Google has been wildly successful at adding diversification. Around 40% of Google’s profit (depending on the quarter) comes from non-search income.
They build a wildly successful cloud platform, they’re expanding their subscription services, they’ve got enterprise offerings, etc
The trick is that Google accepted that none of their other business would likely have the margins and volume that search has, but they did it anyways.
They already attacked it with everything they've got lmao
As in, in 2012. They outright replaced people's email addresses in their profile (makes it harder to reach people outside the walled garden, makes it harder to transfer your credentials to a competing service) and I've heard Google+ links got blocked
Zuckerberg is many things, not everything he's accused of (Trump/Cambridge Analytica) might be entirely accurate but he is at least partly a bit of a scumbag
> Interesting, cutting way back in the product they renamed the whole company for.
It was clearly the wrong bet. He pumped something like $100B into the endeavour (Meta Quest / VR / Horizons) and it is just slowly dying as we speak. He has to give up on it, although I am sure it will be called a "pivot" into AR glasses.
> He pumped something like $100B into the endeavour (Meta Quest / VR / Horizons) and it is just slowly dying as we speak.
Literally never met anyone who used or liked the Horizon thing, VRChat in comparison is more popular and doesn't feel like a soulless corporate husk: they also have quite the variety of worlds, from party games, to someone building a whole jet/chopper flight combat simcade world; ofc all of them are a bit jank, but lots of cool stuff and very expressive avatars.
Meta Quest, on the other hand, seems like a really good piece of tech - I still have my Quest 2 (because I'm broke as hell), but I enjoyed even that one, albeit maybe with a slightly more comfy head strap than the default one and the Virtual Desktop app cause their Link app doesn't support Intel Arc GPUs. The tracking is good, the experience of all sorts of stuff in VR is nice, games like H3VR or VTOL VR are great, as is Into The Radius VR! At the same time, I can see why it never saw super widespread adoption - tricky to develop for and also a somewhat limited audience.
Also the productivity situation just isn't there, closest I got to a good productivity setup (out of curiosity) was the Immersed app before they messed it all up by removing support for physical monitors - I could have my 4 physical monitors in VR surrounded by whatever I want and some virtual monitors and just lock in, it was kind of zen despite the technical limitations. It seems like people got promising tech in place... and then never really wrote good software to take advantage of it. Even Virtual Desktop has artificially enforced monitor limits in VR.
I hope VR tech continues to progress (especially lightweight headsets) no matter what happens to Meta.
Yeah, it was a bizarre decision. There isn't a clear ROI on games and that's what Horizon Worlds has been the whole time. There's no equation that says a 100M game automatically makes 100x more than a 1M game on average. If anything the equation is sub-linear. 100B just doesn't seem like the right size for a game investment.
It's supposed to be a Roblox competitor, which does print money, though probably not to the extent of how much they invested.
The problems are 2 fold:
People/kids don't want to put on a VR headset to play Roblox. I guess they're conceding this point by pivoting to mobile.
Meta is the opposite of cool. Real name requirements, only humanoid avatars, super corpo branding, etc really seriously hold them back from competing with VRChat or Roblox. This one is terminal it'll never be fixable as long as Meta is at the helm.
Even Roblox doesn’t print money if you look into that business. They print engagement but are still fighting tooth and nail to make a dime on it.
I can see Meta wanting the engagement though.
It's not slowly dying, it was dead on arrival and never had any real traction
There are some really good ar glasses for a couple of hundred dollars, I think they are going to end up really cheap and not the 100 billion investment that facebook needs.
Tbf I don't think they ever intended to make back their investments via the goggles. As near as I can tell the thought process was basically: "Real estate + fashion + live entertainment + art + etc is X quadrillion dollars. We could make The Virtual World and capture all that value. It would be irrational not to invest $100B!" Basically Pascal's Investment.
Any you'd recommend or can point me to good reviews for?
They had the money to try something, did it, didn't work. Not unheard of. Still a >$1T company.
I'd like to think that the top minds working on AI have a higher purpose than to get the next generation hooked to a digital morphine drip. Serving soap cutting videos and giving teen girls body dysmorphia isn't a very compelling mission.
Though I'm sure many are mercenaries and will work for whoever pays the most.
> I'd like to think that the top minds working on AI have a higher purpose than to get the next generation hooked to a digital morphine drip
The next 5 years are going to be very disappointing for you.
>I'd like to think that the top minds working on AI have a higher purpose than to get the next generation hooked to a digital morphine drip.
That's the irony. The genius scientists are against AI used for defense, but somehow they're all-in for AI being used to getting people addicted to ads, dopamine, gambling, debt, porn, political manipulation, etc. basically everything that's guarantee to wreck society, but thank god they aren't making weapons I guess.
Can we all say a big thank you to Neal Stephenson for inspiring Zuckerberg to light tens of billions of dollars on fire in this stupid quest? Imagine what kinds of anticompetitive acquisitions or further privacy-invading tech they might’ve spent that on instead.
It makes sense to rebrand anyway, because I'm sure they don't want people to only think of "that social media site" for all of their other ventures. Just like Google rebranding as alphabet
IDK, I still call Google "Google". I even hear employees refer to the entity as "Google". The Meta rebranding seems different.
I think for Google the more meaningful other brands are the actual product ones, like Waymo, Nest, YouTube, Calico, Verily. Those are the ones that benefit from being able to distance themselves a bit from being "a Google company" and all the baggage that comes with that, eg an assumption that it'll be shuttered at some point, will pivot massively into ads, whatever.
I don't think Meta has nearly that need. It's "other companies" are Instagram and Whatsapp, which are basically in the exact same space as Facebook.
I don't think Google really "rebranded" in the same kind of way, since Google is still their brand across the vast majority of their product offerings and the signs on Google offices still say Google. Seems like the Alphabet thing is more about letting the "other bets" be under a higher umbrella, and possibly other reasons related to financial engineering etc.
The rebrand came at a time when "Facebook" was mainly associated with either tremendous scandal (Facebook Files, ad fraud, Cambridge Analytica, Rohingya and Tigray genocides, etc.) or a social media platform increasingly dominated by the elderly.
I think it was a desperate lunge away from that toxic brand toward ANYTHING else. Zuckerberg put his money on VR, given the pandemic and the mild success of Oculus.
Betting big on the metaverse in particular was a mistake, but it might have helped keep the Facebook stink off of products like WhatsApp and Instagram, which remain pretty popular among mainstream audiences.
The sign of a company in absolute decline is when the worst possible place to get info about it, is their official announcement. Whoever wrote the announcement went out of their way to obfuscate the crux of the announcement (compare the clear heading on hackernews to their own heading)
If your (well paid) job is to write and communicate clearly, and for a major announcement you come up with this...not much left to say.
Despite the shock at the amount of money meta spent on their version of the metaverse, I don't think they spent nearly enough to accomplish their vision.
Meta, to the detriment of the market, tried too early in the VR lifecycle to own the market. They basically tried to become the iPhone and Apple in the year 1990.
Tell me, do you believe any singular company in the year 1990, with 100B to burn, would be able to create the iPhone, in any of its varations? Absolutely not, there too much research, too much to invent, too much to program and not nearly enough talent and money for one company to manage.
I think you make a good point but also, honestly, VR seemed so beyond Facebook's depth. Zuck, IMO, was reaching for a pie on a table at the other end of the room. I understand the whole point of acquiring Oculus was to get allies on that table at the other end but---excuse my corpo-speak here---I don't think Oculus ever had synergy with the rest of Facebook's business.
This is just my 2c as an outside observer, software engineer ofc. I'm sure some MBA could make a case for said synergy. But it made sense to acquire Instagram and WhatsApp, for instance, because they'd face similar tech challenges and could benefit from each others' growth playbooks. But Oculus?!?!?! IMO Facebook had a better chance opening a cloud computing division.
So, achieving the Metaverse dream with the money Zuck has spent was always gonna be a tall order at this point but if anyone could've made it work, it wasn't gonna be a social media company.
> because they'd face similar tech challenges and could benefit from each others' growth playbooks
Another point of view: antitrust. What Zuck did with Whatsapp at a minimum ought to be highly illegal. He's a black hat hacker from his history and WA is more of the same. Brian Acton said "it's time, delete Facebook". That's not mutual benefit, that's conquering
On the hardware side, sure, not being able to solve the hardware challenges always seemed like a real possibility.
On the gaming side though, other companies succeeded in making profitable games. Meta seems to have just spent and spent, without getting a game people wanted to play.
They did though! From what I understand from people who made those profitable games is that Facebook funded, either though investments or grants most vr games out there. Even ones not owned by the company (like beat sabre, batman, deadpool, etc).
The problem is, like someone else mentioned, the company itself. Facebook is a middleman company. other people make stuff, showcase it on one of their properties (insta, marketplace, whatever), and then go back to the people actually doing stuff.
Remember, even Apple had the Apple Newton
VR seems cool but imo just sucks as a product no matter how it has been used. Like who is the market for? Gamers? They might be trying to play for the next 12 hours straight. They don't want to waive their arms around and turn their head.
Nongamers? And you are going to somehow get nongamers to shell out for the required hardware for this casual half interest pursuit of theirs? Doesn't work.
I feel like zuck has been billionaire for too long to probably understand this.
Condolences to those that about to be laid off
Context: https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/14/meta-reportedly-considerin...
I met some of my best friends in VR, and had life-changing social interactions in some VR games on the Oculus platform... Especially EchoVR. I'm still a true believer in VR as a medium. It'll go mainstream one day, and there will be a Meta-sized company built upon it.
They had lightning in a bottle and somehow lost it. Honestly it might have been hiring Carmack that sent them down this path. Moving away from PCVR expanded the market, but it also killed the magic. Now the quest store is a wasteland of what look like low budget mobile apps.
It’s wild how much mismanagement Zuck is able to get away with just because he controls majority voting shares in Meta. At this point all of the missteps by the company in AR/VR, AI and everything else can directly be traced back to him. Half-baked vision, massive spending and no accountability. The company desperately needs a Sundar/Satya type leader.
>The company desperately needs a Sundar/Satya type leader.
For the sake of the world's sanity, I'd rather see them go belly up.
Yea, we're all lucky that the company is so badly managed and lacks vision and execution. If they were visionary, competent and effective, Meta products would be an even bigger menace and more destructive than they already are.
At the end of the day the core business is throwing off tonnes of money and is run fine. Would it be better not to throw billions at the next cool thing? Who knows. Probably. But Google does the same thing and they've actually built some cool stuff.
Return it to the shareholders!
Layoffs are probably on the horizon
And those are the non virtual ones, right?
Oh no, those poor people who are happy to get paid making products and services to exploit our basest emotions, amp them for "engagement", subverting civility and democracy in the meanwhile, are going to be laid off?!
It's baffling to me how much they juiced up this platform on Horizon OS, and now they're just axing it from there entirely. Millions if not billions of dollars gone to waste. At least I won't have to see it in the UI anymore, I guess. How does this even happen?
Where will all those Meta Avatars go? Is there a retirement home in the Metaverse?
Taken behind the meta-barn and meta-shot.
Where will they put all those legs?
The app will still exist, but only on mobile (which is absolutely inexplicable).
The most obvious and expected outcome to everyone except Zuck.
Zuck has become a very rich man avoiding all the obvious and expected outcomes. When Facebook stock hit its low a few years ago, HN was explaining why it was doomed. The man has founder mentality at the helm of a trillion-dollar company. It is no wonder he is what he is.
The stock lows was a market overreaction, and it corrected itself soon after. It’s not like Zuck got the company out of the hole by making some genius moves. Quite the opposite. Meta would be in an equally good or better position today had Zuck just done nothing for the last decade.
They just used their war chest to buy a bunch of companies to diversify their revenue stream. It's not like Meta made some massively profitable innovations or new services.
Okay, how long until Meta Quest is discontinued/sunset?
I believe there is no expectation of a Meta Quest 4 right?
In all seriousness, given component price increases etc, the Quest 3 remains an incredible deal for PC VR use. Aside from the foveated rendering, the lens/display specifications are very close to Valve's still to ship Steam Frame, which at this stage will almost certainly cost more than the Quest 3 does.
25 PPD VR headset for 499 with inside-out tracking plus controllers etc is amazing value. I've never once used any of the Meta applications, I only use it for VR games on Steam.
I think there is a case to be made one should buy one while you still can, if you want a great value PC VR headset. It's still an excellent choice for stuff like sim racing as well.
I also think the Quest line of hardware is done for. They are clearly much more interested in the glasses lineup, products like the Ray Bans etc, none of which appear to use any of the Quest software stack.
If only it were made by almost[0] literally anyone else, I'd allow one into my house.
[0]"Almost" has plenty of room for any horrid exception someone might want to gotcha me with, so please don't.
Meta has very recently had leaks of an upcoming lightweight headset. So maybe not a Quest 4 as a direct successor to the Quest 3, but a new headset is in the works.
Rumor is it that the focus of this new headset is AR. Not VR.
So once again they're making a stupid business decision based on wishful thinking.
Exec 1: "Surely, people will want to wear this headset all day while they work! Because the only reason why anyone would NOT want to do that is the weight of the thing!"
Exec 2: "Exactly! Gaming makes us a lot of money—and it's the only reason anyone ever bought our VR headsets—but imagine how much more money we could be making from business customers/apps that currently have no need for such devices. If we build it, they will come though! Can there be any doubt?"
Exec 3: "Not to mention that the data we collect from gamers has almost no value! We need to be collecting intimate details about everyone's lives, not their best Beat Saber scores!"
Exec 4: "You know what? Let's get rid of the controllers entirely. Sure, they're absolutely 100% necessary for decent gaming but I seriously doubt the business applications of AR that we're pretending is a $100 billion market won't need it."
Exec 5: "I'm concerned that end users will be able to do what they want with OUR devices that we're so graciously selling them the privilege to use. We need to ensure they're NOT at all like generic PCs that allow anyone and everyone to run whatever software they want and attach 3rd party hardware. It's not like such capabilities of general purpose hardware were what set off the PC revolution or anything!"
That's okay - it felt cartoony and, I imagine it wasn't the reason why the vast majority of people bought the Quest anyway.
Plenty of people use the 'cartoony' parts of VRChat and even have Quest devices entirely for it. The difference comes down to, well, VRChat just being the plain superior product in almost every regard, especially for social spaces, even after Meta set huge amounts of money on fire with Horizon Worlds.
I have a Quest 2, I only use it to play Eleven Table Tennis VR.
I don't understand what Horizon Worlds is or the other thing mentioned.
Did they ever get legs?
They were trying to compete with an existing, VERY good couple of alternatives, and the people most actually likely to use that product were already on those services.
It was a losing play that didn’t know what market it was actually entering.
What are some alternatives?
VRChat is the most popular one. Age verification. User generated models. User generated worlds. Revenue sharing in worlds. For-sale models and props. It’s quite feature rich now.
Edit: fixed typo
Don't forget the deranged furries.
They're not all deranged! Some are completely productive, functional furries. Probably. Maybe.
Also, your statement is far too reductive! There's plenty of avatars with scales! Also, don't forget the anime girls that are actually middle-aged men and the occasional sentient burrito.
I prefer the remarkably -deep-voiced, tiny birds; the literal smoke alarms, and those who like to Pump Up the Jam, myself!
The suspiciously wealthy software developers, astronauts, pharmacists, game devs and artists that build high quality 3d models, Blender and Substance Painter tutorials and add-ons that prop up a good percentage of the VR headset market, Patreon market, and have a thriving artisan ecosystem?
Sure, but by furries for furries is a market. By normies, for... nobody? Isn't.
Is this a prelude to a huge downsizing in reality labs? I wonder what percentage of RL is working on this app.
When will horizon worlds be axed entirely? It has something like fewer than 10,000 active users at any given time.
From the article:
> By March 31, 2026, Horizon Worlds and Events will no longer appear in the Store on Quest. Also, Horizon Central, Events Arena, Kaiju, and Bobber Bay worlds will no longer be available in VR. You can still jump into your other favorite worlds in VR until June 15, 2026, after which the Horizon Worlds app will be removed from Quest, and Worlds will no longer be available in VR.
But Horizon Worlds will continue to be available on mobile, so it's just the Quest ecosystem losing access in favor of a phone-first platform.
A phone-first VR platform?
Phone-only
The writing has been on the wall for a long time. Very few people want to buy a separate cumbersome face hugger device.
I don't think that's entirely it, they don't want the product facebook is selling. VR Chat is massively more popular than Facebooks offerings.
Though Facebook had impossible goals, they didn't want to make a gaming device, they wanted to make the next smartphone, that everyday people and office workers would use. Which was just unrealistic.
In Snow Crash, the Metaverse was using VR. But it could also have worked via a smartphone. They are independent.
Dang, that's fast. 13 days to market place removal, 90 days until complete shutdown.
MMOs must be expensive to run
I guess that idea just didn’t have legs.
What you did there, I see it. :)
The quest is such a beautiful device. I hope they continue to work on it and release new versions. VR is so good and still in it's infancy.
I have to agree. Is it perfect? Hell no. Is it an insane value for the $250 I paid for my Quest 3s last year at Target? Hell yes.
My kids and I use our two headsets a lot. Sure, it's not a daily driver for workflows, but the uniqueness of many of the game experiences just can't be replicated on desktops/consoles.
It's a damn shame because Facebook bought up Oculus, poured gasoline on a fire by pumping $100B dollars in and now seems set to walk away because it didn't make a $100B + 1 dollars.
In its current state, it was never going to be a replacement for PCs or phone experiences. It's just a different lane all together. But Beat Saber, or Walkabout mini golf, or the I Expect You to Die series are insanely fun and unique. I'll be sad if they fold the quest down entirely, but I hope that Valve or others take up the banner. VR doesn't have to be a $100B industry to be viable, especially in its infancy.
Meanwhile, Apple tosses a $3,500 headset onto the market and then is surprised that it's treated as a novelty. Why is it so hard for these companies to get their strategies right? Maybe it's because it's not a product suited (today, at least) for two of the largest companies on earth to focus on. These are moonshot companies who make products that half of the globe uses on a daily basis.
I just want a solid VR platform with a healthy pipeline or quirky, interesting games.
> VR is so good and still in it's infancy.
I believe 30% of the population cannot use VR in any way shape or form because your inner ear has decided the floor is the only place you can be.
FYI: This is usually solved by placing a fan on the floor in front of your boundary (designated play area). This isn't just a "community tip", it's been studied:
https://www.computer.org/csdl/journal/tg/2025/05/10916971/24...
It's interesting, but this is the kind of barrier that makes Zuck's idea of everyone using VR all the time everywhere impossible. Putting a fan in the space is the kind of hack only someone highly motivated to play VR games would do, not someone who wants to do online shopping.
Even for games or experiences with no artificial locomotion whatsoever?
Yes, my understanding (and I suspect the reason why the airflow experiment worked) is that a large part of the reason this happens is because of a mismatch between the output from the vestibular and visual systems. So, the automated defenses of your body freak out and go into a defensive mode.
I think that ~30% of the population just has more sensitivity to the mismatch.
But surely that requires (virtual) player movement in VR for there to be a mismatch?
I also worry that the whole idea will die before it had a chance to truly blossom. It's really amazing as is and with higher resolution and better field of view it could be on another level altogether. I hope that Valve will keep the tocrch and I plan to get their VR glasses to support the industry.
I never understood why they were trying to recreate real life social interactions in VR, because it's worse by default, and the majority of the nerds who buy this tech are probably trying to escape that on some level. I know that any time I went into Meta Horizon Worlds, I didn't want to hear 95% of the people I heard talking.
What I do use VR for is Bigscreen VR nearly every night to watch stuff with my friends. Scrolling through reels in a movie theater is pretty fun and even though I never do it solo on my phone, I will sit there for like 3-4 hours in VR enjoying communal brain rot.
Perhaps they should focus on things like that instead of gimmicks that nobody cares about. For example, I have never once played a game in VR that didn't force me to sit or stand in a specific position, meaning to play it, I have to go out of my way to do so.
The last 10 years of the VR industry has been about trying to find users beyond the hardcore nerds who want to virtually meet up with friends every night or try out experiences/demos for more than a few days. The moment that hope goes away so do the tens of billions of investment as it was never really about finding out what that group of users wanted.
They just wanted a platform they control instead of apple or Google
Facebook's strong suit has always been gossip. Why are they even spending for anything else
That was the point of Horizon Worlds. They were trying a (very expensive) social play for VR.
The problem is that the intersection/suitability of VR and social media is rather low, while as a counterexample the intersection of mobile and social media is very large. I have no desire to chat with old classmates when I "suit up" with VR goggles, I'm there to game.
Is Meta Horizon Worlds working on PC well? I guess it is their attempt to be competitive with Roblox.
It will be Gemini World instead ...
What a joy to see their Metaverse crash and burn.
They were never able to define this vacuous concept or any value proposition.
Right as AI world models like Genie 3 are taking off too. Seems like a great fit for VR.
That sucks.
At least they had a purpose, a vision.
Now Zuckerberg is going to be all sour about it and even more cynical about everything.
They’re going to go back to what they know how to do: optimize for attention and sell personal data.
Historians will write about the 'metaverse' as the last software frontier humanity embarked on before AI.
What a shame. Hopefully capitalism and AI research does not produce equally bad products and ideas.
I do not think historians will write about the metaverse at all.
Maybe it'll be a case study in business schools for a while, but I think that'll be the extent of its legacy
If they mention it at all, it'll be in the context of the C-suite envy about the money being made with Fortnite skins and "virtual assets", resulting in galaxy brain ideas like "buy land in the metaverse" or "own rare art with NFTs".
It can always have a second life.
And the blockchain.
And soon 20% of meta too
Second Life, which contains only niche perverts, has more concurrent actives than Horizon Worlds.
VRChat also seems to be used only by niche perverts. Perhaps only niche perverts are currently interested in the Metaverse, and Horizon Worlds failed because it didn't cater to niche perverts.
Zucker just keeps failing up.
I find it utterly fascinating how VR and 3D keep coming back in cycles every couple of decades, but ultimately fail to stick.
3D film was big in the 1950's, but fell out of fashion as colour film processes became cheaper and more ubiquitous. The 3D technology of the day couldn't handle colour film, and colour was a bigger leap forward in immersion than 3D. The 3D surge that happened a couple decades ago was in full-colour, but still subsided. Home video was on the rise, and the expense of 3D in the home was probably to blame, as well as half-baked solutions. I owned a 3D capable projector for a while, but it had to be run at a reduced refresh rate and took a big brightness hit in 3D mode. I watched 3D movies only a couple of times, and stuck to good old 2D after that. I no longer own a 3D capable display.
There was a big content problem with 3D movies. Some movies attempted to WOW you with 3D gimmicks. Scott Cameron's "Ghosts of the Abyss" was guilty of this. It was a mostly 2D documentary that occasionally rammed a robot arm in your face or had a collage of images popping out of the wall for no particular reason. The result was that you were more frequently distracted from the experience by 3D gimmicks than further immersed in it. Other films took the approach of making both 2D and 3D versions available, but this made 3D non-essential to the experience. 3D just didn't add much. I often found myself preferring the 2D version because so many cinemas have brightness problems with 3D projection.
VR was big in the 90's, mainly in VR Cafes. The technology was cool as hell in concept, but the reality was underwhelming. Computers of the day just weren't fast enough, and the results were literally nauseating. VR fell out of fashion, the cafes went out of business, and that was mostly it for VR until a few years ago. The current surge has much better hardware and far more compelling experiences. Valve's Alyx is just plain brilliant! Unfortunately, it's still nauseating for some and a truly civilized VR experience seems just beyond the capabilities of all but the most ridiculously expensive hardware at present. As a result, adoption is poor and the current wave of VR is petering out, like 3D did a decade or so ago. There aren't many VR headsets out there, so there isn't a lot of compelling software, so there isn't a lot of reason for more people to buy expensive headsets, and so on.
For my money, the problem is that VR and 3D aren't as big a leap forward as they need to be in order to justify by their current expense and downsides. People can use their imagination to immerse themselves through a 2D window really effectively. VR probably isn't going to catch on until it's cheap and trouble-free. Eventually, it'll be better/cheaper at delivering a big 2D window than a physical 2D screen can, but it's probably not going to succeed until then.
Imagine what $100B could have done for medical or energy research.
As a thought experiment, they probably helped the world global happiness more by burning $100B rather than just sitting on a massive cash hoard as so many tech companies enjoy doing. Sitting in their coffers it was doing nothing. At least this way, it went to a whole bunch of individuals, manufacturing startups, etc. And theoretically many of those recipients spent some of it.
I'm not saying it wasn't wasted spend, but velocity of money is a thing and maybe it's better off in the hands of the people who it was spent on instead of sitting in Zuck's war chest.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velocity_of_money
Can I just remind people what Facebook the company is responsible for? And I'm not talking about Myanmar and so on and so forth and I'm not talking about them as a VR entity. People miss posts all the time because the algorithm won't show it to them, even from close friends. People had accumulated "Other" inbox messages for years, that they were never told about. And so on. "Helping the world global happiness" was never a priority
I wouldn’t call what Meta is providing to the world “happiness”. Addiction is a lot more apt.
Pakistan spent under $20bn to convert to about 25% solar. $100bn would probably have been enough for the whole country of 250 million people.
40 nuclear power plants.
Almost nothing. That is a few weeks of global medical R&D spend, spread over more than a decade.
Annual R&D spending of pharmaceutical companies:
Merck - $17.9B
Johnson & Johnson - $17.2B
Roche - $14.6B
AstraZeneca - $13.6B
AbbVie - $12.8B
Bristol Myers Squibb - $11.2B
Eli Lilly - $10.99B
Meta’s losses on Metaverse last year - $19.2B
So, simply redirecting their spending in that division would instantly propel Meta to be the biggest medical researcher in the world. And as a bonus they’d get a real return out of it.
It would cover the entire NIH budget for two years. That isn't nothing.
It was terrible, and frankly the only way I see it getting to where it got is by upper management keeping their fingers in their ears and their eyes shut.
Maybe I'm just naive but I don't really understand discontinuing things like this. Like, unless there are like 100 people using this, how can it not be possible to just leave this running at like 0.5% of its former capacity. Just leave up like 1 server, collapse all of the DBs into one, and let these few autists have their stuff.
It probably distracts from the AI race. With the newly bought political power it makes far more sense for Meta to align with whatever this administration seeks. And it’s not gaming or VR.
At a minimum, the app needs updates to handle breakages caused by OS updates. It needs moderators and other staff for legal reasons since Meta is large enough that there's always a significant liability risk for even a few users. It needs to interact with the main non-VR app unless they want to fully isolate it. Etc.
When I was at Google, I had many of these discussions about cost tradeoffs for products that were https://killedbygoogle.com/
There might be expensive non-technical maintenance required, such as checks for illegal user content.