You could have, you know, not bought and ruined oculus, and destroyed the VR ecosystem.
I was at GDC the year of the acquisition. There were Facebook suits walking around the showroom floor writing checks to sign exclusivity deals with anyone showing off a VR game.
Facebook flooded the market with cash, but failed to secure any Killer App to get people on their product. I wouldn’t say they ruined Oculus so much as it continues to be an unsolved technology that wasn’t ready for this level of exposure. I still can’t use the damned thing for more than an hour without feeling nauseous, and Meta was trying to gear up Oculus headsets for mass adoption by office workers.
The games market isn’t what they’re fixated on. They want this to be standard hardware for excel-book jockeys.
I suspect that we’ll end up not with the gaming market being where this sticks, but entertainment. Imagine an immersive movie with 360 views.
Imagine an immersive movie with 360 views.
My neck is already hurting from craning all the time. And I’m guaranteed to miss the best part of the movie because I was looking in the wrong direction.
[Publicly traded company] unhappy with how much money [division] burns. Suggests putting the money into stock buybacks.
Wow, this is some hard- hitting journalism that couldn’t possibly write itself!
Even the buybacks are getting crazy when the P/E of these firms is on the order of 30-50. The big financial institutions just assumes these big companies have the growth potential of tiny startups and that they will forever and ever and ever.
Atm, Meta’s actually looking not-terrible with its 27 P/E ratio and $40B/year advertising income stream. So they’ve got plenty of room to fuck around and find out with VR and AI. But eventually, the fact that nobody is advertising on this shit (because nobody is using it) means they have to explain why they’re sinking hundreds of millions into a dead end.
That’ll force them to pivot to some other speculative source of infinite growth. Which will reignite the hype cycle for the Next Big Thing. But, in the end, its the steady monopolization of ad dollars in their existing franchise markets that they care about.
Incidentally, also why they need to shut TikTok down before it eats into their market share even further.
Lemmy hates Meta but honestly the Quest 3 is a fantastic headset. I use mine semi-regularly for wireless Steam VR.
Too bad that it will turn into a brick once meta decides to axe their VR department.
It’s just an android device, someone will make a bootloader unlock and custom rom for it if it comes to that
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According to the report, the company’s chief financial officer, Susan Li, told staff the division has lost $55 billion since 2019.
$55 billion in losses over ~5 years? That’s a substantial amount.
Holy shit, give me just one billion per year and I’ll build you a sexier failure.
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