Meta reportedly told its VR/AR teams to cut spending by a fifth, but the team is still expected to pump out Quest Headsets and AR glasses.
@hark@lemmy.world
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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!

@chemical_cutthroat@lemmy.world
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u/chemical_cutthroat Reportedly Happy With How Much Money Meta’s VR Division Burns

Maybe you shouldn’t have made it so shit

The 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.

z3rOR0ne
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Sounds like the intial pitch probably went something like this, except they weren’t realistic about the timeline.

Can’t watch the clip in my country, but it’s a common enough theme with tech bros. Theranos also comes to mind.

@einlander@lemmy.world
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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.

@barsquid@lemmy.world
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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.

Alphane Moon
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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.

@stoly@lemmy.world
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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.

@Valmond@lemmy.world
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Holy shit, give me just one billion per year and I’ll build you a sexier failure.

@umbrella@lemmy.ml
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give me one billion period and ill build you a kickass vr set without bullshit, and ill probably have money spare for me and possibly descendants to retire. people underestimate how much money one billion actually is.

@Valmond@lemmy.world
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People underestimate how much a fucking Million is! It’s like a lifetime salary (3k/m for 27.8 years).

We should call billions thousand millions.

@Buffalox@lemmy.world
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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/

@Coreidan@lemmy.world
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VR is over rated as fuck. It will never be mainstream.

Part of me agrees and part of me doesn’t.

I don’t know a kid who doesn’t have at least a Quest 2. I have four brother in laws aged 11-16 and every time I go over there at least two of them are in the basement rocking the headset. My neighbor is on his every day. My daughter has the Quest 2, full body trackers, and a beefy gaming PC almost exclusively dedicated to VR. The kids are all in, seriously.

I’m 38. I have a Quest 2 but I also have two toddlers and an infant (in a couple weeks anyway). I haven’t turned my Quest on in about a year. I got pretty heavy into Pavlov for a while, but here’s where the failure comes in for VR being mainstream and widely adopted. I can’t play and watch my children. I have to ask my wife to take on all of the responsibility just so I can play, and I don’t feel good about that so I just don’t play.

It isn’t the same as something like a Steam Deck. I can put it down and get back into it easily while also keeping an eye on the world around me. I can put my kids on my lap and they can watch me play if they want to. You just can’t do that in VR. It completely disengages you from your surroundings. It isn’t easy to jump in and out of it because you have to be trapped to a dedicated space with your eyes turned off to the world.

I love VR, but not enough to pull myself entirely out of my life to play. I think most people face that issue.

It’s a nonissue when you’re a teenager on summer break with no responsibilities. There’s just no room in a busy life for VR.

I’d like to see it succeed. I’d like to see it come to a point where you can somehow keep your real space visible, if only on a monitor in the corner of a high res display. I love it, I just can’t use it.

My 6 year old has never played or seen a video game.

I take her to the beach, playdates at the park with friends, we go mountain biking, etc. Hearing your stories makes my flesh crawl

I mean, you do you. I personally love video games and I’ve loved them all of my life. It’s something I can do with my kids that allows us to connect. I didn’t grow up in a world with access to anything else. There’s no beach trip in a world where your shoes have holes in them and you’re living on brown beans. My mom always found a way to scrounge up an old video game console for us and we’d borrow games from friends who had it better or had stopped playing their older games. Hell, when we stayed in a women’s shelter once for weeks, all the kids who were stuck there got by on the Sega Genesis and the Super Nintendo in the tv room. We were able to bond and make friends in that horrible place with that shared horrible experience because of video games.

I had adventures that wouldn’t have been available to me without video games. I had fun that wouldn’t have been available to me without video games. It’s hard for me to understand why you feel the way you do, but I guess we’ve had very different experiences and you feel the same way on the opposite side of it.

My grandmother just passed away, and when I stood there at her casket I remembered very fondly sitting in the floor with her and beating all of the Donkey Kong Country games. She wasn’t physically able to do much and video games brought us together and made us connect and enjoy life together. I remember the weeks leading up to Christmas in 1998 when my mother and I would sneak and open the only present I had under the tree (Zelda, Ocarina of Time) when my dad would go to sleep.

I’m happy that what you do with your kid makes you happy. I don’t understand why you’ve had such an extreme reaction to what we do though when it really doesn’t matter. People like what they like.

@IsThisAnAI@lemmy.world
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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.

@thorbot@lemmy.world
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deleted by creator

[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.

But the worst part is how they affect me personally. With my big glasses 🤓 I am no longer allowed at places of personal interest such as science and engineering events, nudist beaches, orgies at friends houses and gangbang dates.

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