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.
That is a way more legit reason to still be mad, in my book, and it predates the Facebook acquisition. Oculus had made all that noise about how their devices would be platform agnostic and they wouldn’t try to railroad you into buying games through their platform and the moment there was money buzz around the idea Luckey dropped that stuff like it was red hot and we ended up with the travesty that is the PC Oculus store.
I don’t think VR was ever going to be mainstream, but imagine what the software ecosystem would be if tecbro Smeagol hadn’t gotten greedy for that precious, precious investment money.
At least we have some pretty amazing hardware with a decent variety to choose from.
Yeah, I wish more quality content was made for VR, but it’s still pretty mind blowing even with what we have.
Yeah, well, don’t tell the local patrons, I’m in like post a hundred below of “how dare you acknowledge anything remotely serviceably about a Meta-related product”.
But yeah, no, you’re pretty much right. They’re subsidizing a huge chunk of that entire corner of tech. I don’t think it’s a mainstream type of device, but I’m glad we all got to spend a few years messing with it as a semi-viable consumer product, even if it’s just a bit of an overengineered novelty thing.
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.
Moto X (2013) has a 360 demo movie on it. It was alright and neat to spin around in your chair to follow the action, but at the same time I could have sat still and the camera moved.
Truly a solution looking for a problem.
Maybe you shouldn’t have made it so shit
Listen pal - Do you know how hard it is to make legs for a wii-like avatar?! We need another 8 billion.
Hello, I am a friendly ghost coming to attend your serious business meeting in the Metaverse. Did you know that this is going to be a massive industry? Buy your Metaverse real estate now, it’s definitely not a fake digital asset that Facebook can create and delete at will.
Maybe you shouldn’t have made it
so shitThe tech in general just isn’t good enough to do that much more. It’s like having a coal powered steam engine and then saying you’ll build a formula 1 car with it. They thought that with throwing enough money at the wall, a few breakthroughs in tech would fall out, but it doesn’t work like that. If you’re very lucky you hit one breakthrough, but they needed a few.
Cutting spending by 20% while not reducing output will definitely accomplish that, too!
[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
we now have to count on companies going bakrupt and some volunteer picking it up and making it good 🥲
I wouldn’t rely on that. Those projects take a ton of time and aren’t always able to activate all the features.
Why would it? It’s just an android device. LG didn’t brick all their smartphones when they pulled out of that market.
Quest is from Oculus, Metaverse is from Facebook, different management leads to different quality
It felt better when VR was the hot new buzzword, right? Oh well, there’s the AI division also burning money, but at least it’s the current buzzword!
90% of technology companies quit before making a hit VR product. We should encourage Meta to spend more.
Let’s hope Meta sinks every last dime of their profit into “the next big thing” that is their VR division
I’d much rather see meta burn money into the fun project that is VR rather than AI or crypto.
Meh, the problem will always be that Meta will use its VR platform as a data vacuum first and foremost, which makes it a nonstarter (at least for me)
Well, if I didn’t have to make a face book log in to use one. If not for that I would consider one to play in steam. Even if I had to have it tethered.
Same sentiment except additionally I will never buy anything from Facebook because they are radicalizing people.
Not going to buy an Apple Vision either if it won’t behave as a generic screen for any OS.
I am utterly sick of the account requirement and proprietary connector bullshit from every company.
I think they don’t require that anymore. It’s a “Meta login” which can be separate from Facebook. At least for Quest devices.
do you struggle to play peekaboo? how do you not grasp that they’re feeding into the same software ecosystem and your data is being stored in the same database?
Not separated enough for me. I know all the big companies are bad, but I won’t touch google/fb hardware.
Call it what you want, but this requirement prevents me from buying their products too. I use no Meta services. Don’t wanna start.
Welcome to the classic social media 100m dash. Become a popular dunk target on socials > get people to call such and such choice as a dealbreaker > stop doing such and such > it is now “not enough”, or “they’ll enshittify it later” or “a slippery slope”.
Which fine, whatever. I’m not saying Meta are “good guys” (no corporation is, honestly). What I will say is a) that is not a particularly productive or functional way to engage with pretty much anything, especially when there is no comparable alternative to a product, and b) this is a remarkable incentive to NOT acknowledge criticism. I mean, if I’m Meta and I see this often, what is the incentive to not just force everybody to EULA away as much as possible? People will give me crap for it regardless, so I may as well get to sell some sweet, sweet data.
FWIW, I’m skeptical of the ability of Meta to turn around the VR market as a whole, I don’t like many of their privacy and content moderation practices and I no longer use Facebook, Instagram or Threads. But hey, I do have a Whatsapp account because it’s pretty much mandatory to exist in society, and I do have a Quest headset, which I agree is the best price to performance you can buy and works flawlessly with PC VR both wired and wirelessly.
I’m not reading anymore of this thread, but go move to the EU and request all the data those companies you mentioned have on you. You will see a truly staggering amount of your day to day info from some of them. Facebook and google are just advertising companies trying to get their thumbs in every pie they can convince enough people to buy into. Part of that is designing their products to require phoning home. The issue isn’t signing in. Signing in is just the trojan horse to make sure every bit of data they pull from you is tied to the right advertising account ID. They shouldn’t be allowed to continue to do that, even if they have enough money to lobby for its legality. Even if every single company on earth was freely doing it to the same degree people should still push for a change.
The business world is truly a slippery slope. Google made unethical digital advertising into a major market, and now even if they close shop somebody else will come fill the gap. The only way to put the power back in people’s hands is to regulate them out of existence but that will never happen if most people don’t even know it’s happening because you can’t even fucking complain about it on the internet without a hundred reply thread jfc
No, hold on, get it right, the 100 post thread is about somebody defending something tangentially related to them. Thread was nice and short with just complaining, it was when somebody pointed out that the requirement people were complaining about had been removed that the massive dogpile started.
And yes, by the way, I do know what data these companies have on me. I pulled all my Google data just last week, all 50 gigabytes of it. I agree that regulation is the answer to this. Absolutely. Everybody knows that, nobody is finding that via a rant about factually incorrect anecdotes about Meta’s VR headset, of all things.
But also, I have an Android phone. With a Google account on it. Do you not have a phone? Nobody is saying to not complain about abusive data mining or breaches of privacy, but you don’t have to performatively pretend to never engage with them or that the reason they get away with it in absence of regulation isn’t that they do make things people want or need.
This conversation boils down to whether it’s a moral imperative to turn your chosen cause into your entire personality at the expense of reality and beyond any nuance whatsoever. And honestly, in the current sociopolitical context, and despite being just about the most superfluous demonstration of this imaginable… man, it’s such a bummer.
But hey, I do have a Whatsapp account because it’s pretty much mandatory to exist in society,
I’ve never encountered a situation in which I’ve needed to use WhatsApp for anything. Today i guess i learned that i don’t “exist in society” or something. 😆
Go find the other response I gave to someone else who made that exact joke.
TLDR, I’m guessing you’re American and just don’t realize to what extent WhatsApp has entirely replaced texting in many, many places around the world, regardless of whether you use Android or iPhone.
Who cares?
Why does a texting app have a network effect for you? Is SMS completely unavailable on people’s phones in your country? Or are you just afraid of seeming a little bit different from the pack?
Because, see if you can follow this logic, sometimes my mom wants to tell me things. Also my doctor. And my government. And the plumber. And delivery guys.
It’s not a “pack”, it’s a society and a family. And it’s not about “being different”, it’s about not having to explain to every single person in my life that they need to talk to me through a different device than they use for literally everything else.
Nobody I know has sent a SMS since the 2010s. You do not realize how detached from reality that sounds. I just checked my phone, the last time I received a legit SMS that wasn’t an automated notification was February 2022, when a seller from an eBay-like service wanted to ask me a thing about a delivery.
SMS is still expensive in other countries, internet access is cheap and WhatsApp is free. For example, it’s the only way my mom can keep in contact with her family in South America.
b) this is a remarkable incentive to NOT acknowledge criticism. I mean, if I’m Meta and I see this often, what is the incentive to not just force everybody to EULA away as much as possible?
how incredibly fucking dishonest. profit motive is more than enough incentive for them to continue to do what they’ve already been doing for close to two decades.
“don’t boycott exceptionally shitty companies or you’re responsible when they just get worse” is possibly the worst take i’ve seen so far on lemmy.
That would sure be a bad take. Let me know when somebody makes it.
In the meantime I continue to argue that if you boycott people on the basis of their reputation without reversing that stance when they reverse their behavior then you’re not “boycotting” anything, you’re just removing yourself from the pool of possible customers altogether.
My issue isn’t with the notion of boycotting companies, my issue is with the moving of goalposts when the companies do cave to the pressure just to extend the online ragefest. I get that it’d be easier to argue with the imaginary opponent in your head, but if you want to argue with me instead I’d appreciate addressing the actual issue.
In the meantime I continue to argue that if you boycott people on the basis of their reputation without reversing that stance when they reverse their behavior then you’re not “boycotting” anything, you’re just removing yourself from the pool of possible customers altogether.
Dude, Meta has been and continues to be fucking terrible. If you don’t understand why then i guess you’ve been living in your closet in a VR headset for the last two decades.
No, I understand the ways in which Meta is terrible.
I also understand the ways in which they’re not because I’m an adult who is capable of holding semi-complex concepts in my mind.
Meta sucks, their role in social media has been a massive net negative for society and they are at best in denial about that, and at worst a deliberate bad actor.
But they’re also a huge corporation, so if their dumb chat app is the standard for communication or their VR headsets are great and dirt cheap I will interact with them, just like I interact with Apple, Microsoft, Netflix and a bunch of other corporations I fundamentally disagree with on key issues.
I hate this notion that money is support. It is not. That is a stupid ass ultracapitalist fallacy to make people feel good for ineffectually buying one brand of cereal over another. I don’t take a political stance on Meta by not buying their cheap stuff, I do so by supporting political actors who are willing to break apart oligopolistic media companies and regulate their role in society.
They haven’t reversed any behavior.
There is no circumstance that justifies having any account with anything Facebook owns, and stealing other company’s names to try to trick people into thinking they’re a different company doesn’t change that.
Well, thanks for passing judgement on… let me check here… two billion people, as it turns out.
They have, in fact, reversed the policy that required linking your Quest account to a live Facebook account, though. That is a fact, perceived moral failings of a significant chunk of humanity or not.
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 loses over ~5 years? That’s a substantial amount.
Not a drop in the bucket of their revenues, though. This is really about someone feeling angst that they can’t get an extra quarter percent increase in profits for the quarter so that the dividends go up just so slightly.
Wow, that’s like half the total value of Nike!!!
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/NKE/Or about the same as Ford:
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/F/Holy shit, give me just one billion per year and I’ll build you a sexier failure.
give me one billion period and ill build you a kickass vr set without bullshit, and ill pprobably have money spare to retire. people underestimate how much money one billion actually is.
People underestimate how much a fucking Million is! It’s like a lifetime salary (3k/m fir 27.8 years).
We should call billions thousand millions.
In a lot if countries a thousand million is a milliard and a million million is a billion. But somehow US English skipped the -liard numbers and it’s influencing UK English these days as well.
These are known as the short scale and long scale systems respectively. Though the United States was indeed the first English-speaking country to switch to short scale, pretty much all English-speaking countries have used short scale almost exclusively for a long time, including the United Kingdom. Saying that it’s simply being influenced is an understatement. From Wikipedia:
British usage: Billion has meant 109 in most sectors of official published writing for many years now. The UK government, the BBC, and most other broadcast or published mass media, have used the short scale in all contexts since the mid-1970s.[12][13][43][15]
Before the widespread use of billion for 109, UK usage generally referred to thousand million rather than milliard.[16] The long scale term milliard, for 109, is obsolete in British English, though its derivative, yard, is still used as slang in the London money, foreign exchange, and bond markets.
I’ve never actually seen the word milliard used in English outside of discussions about the long and short scale systems. However, many other languages do mainly or exclusively use long scale. For instance, my native language French.
Y’all are pissy at Meta, but I hope they are successful. A virtual reality social network is a fantastic idea and I hope they can figure out a way to bring a cool communication app to the masses. That camera that followed you was a great idea that got lost in the Facebook hate.
If there’s anything we’ve learned over the past couple decades, then that any sort of social network by this company is a terrible idea.
No idea what camera you’re talking about, but we need less cameras, not more. I don’t want to get recorded or live streamed by some strangers either, especially not if it is some stupid as drone that causes even more noise pollution.
I think you speak for the minority. Video calling is quite popular and there is a healthy market behind it. I love the communication that’s possible with family. Being able to have a multi room conversation that followed me while I clean and cook would be fantastic.
If you think the majority of people do frequent video calls then you’re even more delusional than I thought. But that has nothing to do with flying cameras or the disinformation cesspools that Facebook social media platforms are anyway.
Edit: Oh. You’re that dingus that said the ban of menthol cigarettes is the cause of the rise of fascism in America. It all makes sense now.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1254856/mobile-video-calling-age-gender-distribution/ and it’s only getting more popular. My daughter is growing up using these services to speak with her family. You think she’s going to suddenly think, let’s step back 30 years?
People are certainly not asking for less cameras on their devices either.
🤷♂️
I’m absolutely ready to admit that I’m probably just too old to embrace this cool new thing but I’ve just never really been that excited about it.
To be absolutely honest, the idea that a corporation can control what I’m seeing in some altered or virtual reality just makes my skin crawl.
I understand that most people won’t feel the way I do. I understand that my preferences may be unusual.
It’s just not my thing.
Good. Learning Facebook bought Oculus was fucking depressing as shit.
What they’ve done to it since has been worse than what most (if not all) of us expected.
meta: makes vr division
also meta: is shocked it bleeds money
keep in mind meta didnt make occulus, they bought it out. Oculus is just on the list of silicon valley startups that suceeded in getting bought out and profited from. (of the 10x more that fail)
Is this supposed to be better somehow? Personally it doesn’t make much difference to me if Meta created their own shitty VR or bought a decent VR then made it shitty… The result is the same.
They didn’t make shit. They did what Google loves to do and they bought a highly successful, incredibly progressive company. And now it’s shit, just like alllll the others that got bought out by big names.
“meta unhappy” good…
Damn. Sorry to feel about that emotion a soulless corporation is having.
VR is over rated as fuck. It will never be mainstream.
“VR” at its heart is just 3D goggles, motion sensors, software, etc. So yes it’s overrated but I don’t see any tech reason why it couldn’t be mainstream. It takes a really dumb and shitty company to fuck it up.
