Go Valve go. Screw Facebook/Meta, Google, Apple. I want the future of VR to be standard desktop Linux centric. The iOS/Android state of mobile is annoyingly restrictive compared to even Windows let alone desktop/server Linux
Watch Valve put Proton on phones. It’s going to be incredible.
One more piece of bad news for VR
VR is doing fine. It’s a niche hobby for people like myself to feel like you’re inside of a game, movie, or porn. If you’re someone who does work on your own device, you can even work in VR.
The metaverse was a ridiculous idea, that is beaten by VRChat.
For some reason, your comment made me think of https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0104692/plotsummary/
true
If they can burn a billion dollars on shit everyone else knew was a failure from day 1, they can pay a fucking reasonable tax rate
I guess the idea just didn’t have legs!
Over $100 billion down the toilet and zuck is still one of the richest people in the world wtf?
He can afford to do it again and then again again. I guess the idea is to keep gambling in hopes of becoming the dominant comany in a massive industry.
100 billion must be in lost market capitalization, not real money, just like tesla is theoretically worth a trillion dollars, no one could recognize that money.
100 billion is a touch higher than I’ve read elsewhere, but evidently they actually spent $77 billion ‘real’ dollars:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/mark-zuckerberg-threw-77-billion-143014208.html
Good god I figured it must have been wrong as it’s such a large amount of money. I wonder how much of that they borrowed and how much they paid in cash. They might be paying astronomical interest payments on all of that.
Just goes to show how we have all the wrong people in charge in the west, at every level from government to business from the ceo on down to middle managers. Zuck is case and point. Well, as someone else posted, this article about their failure has legs. Unlike his stupid metaverse, that no one seemed even slightly interested in from the start.
Yeah, they bought a modest, niche product with a likely viable business case, and then bet they could make it an everyman’s device for all their socializing and experiencing events like sports and music…
The people that actually wanted the device got to take a back seat to them chasing non-existent markets for it… Their aspirations so impossibly high that a niche device could no longer justify itself against the money spent chasing that non-existant market… So something that should have been for some VR nerds to be happy and sustain the business while the rest of the world shrugs and say ‘I don’t get it’ becomes an ‘Obviously this is a failure of a concept and no one should bother doing this’.
Classic case of yes men-ism. Everyone around zuck tells him he’s the greatest, smartest, infallible. He likely removed anyone from his life that was willing to tell him he was wrong. He is making money hand over fist, and believes it, he’s special, the laser light of all knowledge shines out of his ass, don’t look directly at it or you can go blind. So he gets an idea, tells his people how he thinks everyone could get into it, they all heartily agree, what a great idea zuck!
I bet if anyone did tell him it wasn’t, he fired or removed them from his life, and still hasn’t apologized or made amends about it too, and instead doesn’t hold any sort of grudge against the people that told him he was right despite knowing better and being too craven to tell the truth.
Bruh they definitely spent real money on developers and marketing.
The US economy has devolved from an economy where you gain money by making and selling things to an economy where investing in the stock market and then taking out loans on that stock to keep investing is a better way to keep making money. When was the last time someone rich became poor?
That is one of the ways they avoid taxes. They take out loans to pay old loans and to spend on the value of their investments at good rates, and since they never realize income they never pay taxes. I think interest is even tax deductible to a degree.
Bezos in 2020, a year his wealth multiplied obscenely, paid 600 dollars. Less than we did.
As per a couple of propublica articles they published around 2021.
The excellent article in question: https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trove-of-never-before-seen-records-reveal-how-the-wealthiest-avoid-income-tax
Dang, I pay more in taxes in a single paycheck than bezos did in a year.
Trillion is the new Billion.
If a company can dump $100B into failed project and still be profitable they have too much money. Jesus, imagine would would happen if this money went to the workers instead…
It’s actually crazy that you can burn $100B in a project that everybody mocked from the beginnings and still be CEO after that while having earned billions in compensation
this is what’s called “holding a controlling interest.”
Hell, it’s fucking insane that we have to earn our bonuses and they still fucking suck yet these people will get millions after fucking it all up. Imagine if a regular worker failed this hard and was like “so where’s my $15,000 Christmas bonus?”
I didn’t fuck up and only got a tenth of that.
You guys are getting Christmas bonuses?
I didn’t fuck up and I always got the “default” $500CAD.
I didn’t fuck up and they gave me 50$
To be fair, my last company didn’t pay anything because… uhm they had a record breaking year but they wanted more and thus it was nearly bankrupting them. Emotionally, I mean.
Some of us only get a membership to the jelly of the month club.
imagine would would happen if this money went to the workers instead…
where do you think the money went? I imagine a lot of it went to workers salaries…
[sweating profusely] Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers!
I hope this meme never dies, but I fear it’s already reaching obscurity
I only learned about it 3 weeks ago… trying to keep it alive
I’M DOING MY PART
You’re right, a lot of it probably went to the devs but from what I’m reading the cash burn is so bad because it’s extremely chaotic in there, lot’s of bad decisions, canceled projects, lot’s of directors swapping places. No idea what part of it went to low ranking devs and what went to consultants and building useless prototypes.
My understanding is that Facebook’s culture is very cutthroat. Throw other people under the bus, try to make your rivals’ project fail, do a huge unnecessary refactor to “make a name” for yourself, that sort of stuff.
imagine would would happen if this money went to the workers instead
imagine if they used it develop poor countries
My guess is they collected enough unique data from people using the headsets that its a wash.
No, from what I’m reading they just pump money into it senselessly. VR/AR devices are $1B a year market and they pumped like $18B into it in a year. They just don’t care because they make so much money they can burn it.
Great News!
Nobody should use or support anything Meta. As a matter if principle.
i just hate how the cheapest VR’s are only from meta (as of writing this)
The only reason I log in now is marketplace. Which I need.
The whole concept was dead on arrival. Second Life never took off and it was perplexing to see that Meta thought it could make it work.
Second Life never took off
“In 2013, it had approximately one million regular users.”
‘Second Life’ has been chugging along for twenty-two years, with an actual in-game economy and a GDP of 500 million bucks. But clutchtwopointzero here thinks it ‘never took off’.
I mean, SL took off enough that it’s still here. A lot of F2P MMOs from around then aren’t really around anymore at all, I can only think of 2 others.
It may not be one of the big MMOs, but an estimated 600k MAU isn’t anything to sneeze at either.
I mean - it kind of does work. There are millions of people socializing in online games. Playing World of Warcraft with their friends or people they met there. Building crazy things on a Minecraft server while forming friendships. Playing on that Counterstrike Server for decades with the same people. Forming that guild or that clan in an MMORPG. There is something that does work. Not sure why Zuckerberg wanted VR to be part of that and that Facebook touch of poo is also not helping, but trying to build “World of Warcraft for your aunt” is not the worst idea.
i guess, but it woulf require the least likely people to adopt a new and expensive technology. think about how long it took for the older generations to catch on to the internet and smart phones. they may be glued together now but it took 20 years and every single other person on earth getting one to make it happen.
warcraft for your lonely aunt is a fine idea. making that vr was poorly conceived. it would have to work on a phone AND be more compelling than just taking on call or text.
but also, the early adopter types that are more or less necessary to get something like this off three ground were never going to like it. that’s us. you can’t create a new tech market segment that wasn’t explicitly asked for without at least considering the nerds. meta has negative trust among nerds. we all saw this as the marketing and data collection tool that it is meant to be.
it was never going to happen. at least until they have full control of all of our devices and platforms and can just say we need it to continue existing in society now. that or b2b contracts are the only ways i could see this ever taking off. it would take some serious marketing voodoo bullshit to convince any sizable businesses that this would increase profits.
Yeah - Facebook kind of is the right company to produce something like this. They kind of had a little bit of this with Farmville back in the day. They have all those people and your aunt on their apps. There has to be a way to get all those Facebook users into gaming, to get all those WhatsApp groups to play together or to implement something on Instagram. It’s really stupid how they did this
yeah, they really lost their early edge on the granny gamer market lol. they’ve all jumped ship to those bejeweled like games and virtual jugsaw puzzles. maybe wordle if they’re bookish.
i think there are little things you can play in some of their messaging platforms, but they change so much on those so often that these kinds of users probably ignore 90% of the interface. i think those hit more with the gen z and gen a younger crowds. especially when it can also become social media content. tiktok is great at that.
Games have something to do with socialization as an extra benefit.
The meta shit was conceived of as 3d advertising with socialization as an extra benefit.
What happened to Second Life anyway? All the gooners are on VRChat now and they seem to be doing fine
Pretty sure it just has been going through a slow but inevitable death. Probably being propped up by like 2 gen x and 5 generation Jones.
Yeah, but I mean there’s “you shouldn’t use this because Meta is bad” and then there’s “no one wants to use this because it is, on a fundamental level, an incredibly stupid idea and I can’t believe anyone thought this would ever catch on.”
Facebook itself sucks now. It is not a feed of your contacts’ posts, it’s all groups, I have no control over that feed, unless I look up each friend individually I only get to see what they choose to show me, which is maybe one every 10 listings on the feed. It’s super glitchy, especially from my phone, posts just disappear with no trace, I am unable to use it in a dozen ways that they never bothered to fix. It’s getting worse as well. Total garbage.
And they are losing critical mass, as they suck more people leave, it’s mostly the older people that are still using it all the time that I’ve seen. We need a fediverse alternative, hopefully where it can interact with other forums on the fediverse like lemmy and mastadon.
I think you might need a reality check. Facebook has 3 b-b-billion monthly active users. It’s the most used social media platform in the world, by a large margin. Followed in second way behind by Instagram, Meta’s other social platform. So it doesn’t suck enough for those people to quit using it.
Yeah I guess they are no where near losing critical mass, a lot of people are leaving though, and even more are spending way less time on there.
Also, a great share of those monthly users will be inauthentic, half of all accounts online are influence agent accounts, bots and such.
Still it’s a lot of people on it. I talk to a lot of people that hate it now too, many that have left, or like me just keep it for marketplace. Or like mushroom id groups, or repair groups it is great for that. But with the lack of a viable alternative with critical mass they are under no pressure to get better.
The Aristocrats!
Don’t worry. The billions Zuck dumped into crypto and NFTs will pay for the billions he dumped into VR.
He’s a genius, dontchaknow.
Lol at all the companies who got rugpulled again because they trusted Zuck’s promises. Get rekt bozos.
This is a good reason not to let Jeff Bezos convince you that computer saas is a good idea.
Rent seeking. Landlords are leeches.
I was struggling to think where i recognized that bit was but you just solved that. They want rent, never for you to own anything, much less anything tangible that cant be taken away or revoked or forced to surrender or relinquish
Appl does the same with music and videos and audiobooks and books They want to license it to you and for you to have zero access to the actual files and brainwash entire ongoing new generations to not even understand a file system/owning real files and knowing where to get basically any file you want. The whole notion of a file having tangible value and operable
But what about the zero people who used it? Whatever will they do?
But this time it will be totally different! They’ll learn to love our AI slop! Trust me, bro!
Meta Horizon Worlds is a giant unlicensed and unmoderated daycare.
So there are people parking their toddlers in a VR world?
The overwhelming majority of vr world users are children ages 7-14. There are almost no adults. The adults that are there are trying to interact with kids in an environment where there is zero supervision.
There’s a lot of VR chat communities that heavily self moderate that crap out so adults can actually enjoy games/social instances. This approach created a whooooole lotta Wild West space full of every IP stealing debauchery you can imagine, but like the early Internet also allowed for a ton of creativity and fun. Meta’s approach was to try to simply not allow anything that would be inappropriate for anyone ever to sanitize for corporate sponsors, leading to a sterile and soulless waste of time.
Utterly shocked which one has regular users creating and exploring.
Fun aside but I went into one of these heavily moderated adult communities on Meta and I was using a headset that was enterprise controlled so it had no personal meta account attached which meant I didn’t have an avatar.
When I showed up I appeared as a featureless grey avatar. I made a lot of friends until the moderator with a heavy southern US accent called me a hacker (because I was grey and featureless) and started genuinely freaking out and yelling.
A whole crowd gathered around me and some people were saying that I was a government agent (lol) and another suggested I was Russian. Anyways, they banned me for 7 days which sucked.
I went through a VR witch hunt because I was GREY.
The most funny thing about this is that they banned you for 7 days. No permaban for the russian government agent, just 7 days!
Yeah it makes the first experience with a Meta headset extremely awkward. You boot it up they and they really want you to go into these worlds. Okay, so I did. Immediately I’m bombarded by the sound of 20 unsupervised children raiding a virtual McDonald’s. Okay, maybe I should find an 18+ world and try that. This was also a mistake.
They made it for work too? TIL.
