Zack has always wanted to make his own ideas happen but hasn’t had any success doing so.
Amazon is different. Went from books to total ecommerce to IT provider, logistics provider. Yet I hear many complaints about their service quality. They screwed me out of 40 USD that they promised to reimburse in a chat (I have the chat!) and then called it a "misunderstanding". People also complain about Amazon Prime on Reddit and why they canceled.
Source (Page 48): https://www.matthewball.co/all/stateofvideogaming2025
Im really curious what Meta/Apple/Microsoft are predicting for the future
Gonna put that in my pocket to pull out next time someone is touting a consultant’s overly rosy market forecast.
HN you love risky bets, don’t you?? Isn’t the hacker ethos all about risk?
Why deride this - it’s just risk at the big boys table.
HN isn’t a single person or hive mind. Like everywhere else on the web and the world, there are many different opinions and views.
> Isn’t the hacker ethos all about risk?
No? I’ve never before seen anyone making that argument. Doing a quick search, I’m not still not finding sources which place “risk” as a mainstay of hacker culture.
i really beg to differ on the "hive mind" phrase. Try to run counter to the the thoughts/beliefs de jour in any conversation on economic/government policy and you'll find out how much of hive mind HN really is. Recall the discussions during Covid of Sweden's approach to lockdowns. The rejection was swift and harsh to the idea of even discussing the topic.
I don’t recall those. Do you have a link? Preferably more than one, since there’s bound to have been more than one discussion.
Every time I’ve seen someone giving examples of HN agreeing on a stance of some contentious topic, I went back to the discussions and could find plenty of comments supporting either side.
Nevertheless, one example doesn’t prove a rule, and agreement on one subject doesn’t demonstrate a hive mind. I’m feeling confident that if a Flat Earth topic were to be posted, most people here—like most people in the rest of the internet and the world—wouldn’t agree with it.
Furthermore, there have been plenty of issues which have been flagged in which I disagree with the flagging, and they still contain plenty of conversation supporting either side. Sometimes it’s even reposted at a later point and it becomes a highly-voted front page article. It often depends on the day and time something is posted. There are simply too many humans on HN.
$60bn could have financed a PS/Xbox competitor and then some, but the genius thought it should be VR, something the mainstream consumer market has rejected over and over again.
Why would I want to strap a clunky VR device to my head to enter a 3D VR to then awkwardly use a virtual keyboard to type an email? Why would I want to do a 3D VR call with low-polygon avatars when I can just do a regular video call? There are very few use cases where this adds anything. Even in gaming, it will probably remain a niche genre, because most genres just work better without VR, especially competitive ones where input precision and latency are crucial.
VR can live on alongside tablets and desktop computers and be a healthy nichey market. It doesn't need to take the world by storm and there is IMHO no need for it to replace Zoom calls (to be honest, Zoom calls are already the bane of our life, why would I want to pay to do them in even more constraining ways ?)
Trying to find the "next big thing" in absolutely everything is a curse.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/04/every-fusion-startup-that-...
That $60B is like US GDP, big but inefficient. Meta spent it on bad acquisitions and inflated comp while those fusion startups are lean and actually build things.
I'm not a big fan of meta and I'm not convinced they've made correct decisions all our even most of the time but Zuckerberg has been consistent in saying that this is a long-term plan. (Weather he sticks to it or not here's a different question. The rise of AI and the looming antitrust threat might well change his priorities)
And then I remembered how hard he pushed all the VR/AR stuff just a couple years ago, just as incisively, going so far as to rename Facebook to Meta.
On balance I think I have ever more respect for him because of this flub: most CEO's, especially ones whose entire adult identity is tied to their company, would not be willing to pivot this completely from a lost cause to a smarter one. And of those, only a subset would be able to accomplish it.
Gotta give credit where it's due.
Facebook was to Phillip-Moris as Meta is to Altria Group.
Part was a strategic realignment toward something zuck perceived as bigger, sure. And this kind of spend goes beyond what would have been needed to accomplish a rebrand.
It's R&D. At the very least, the stuff that you learn guides other stuff that you do. It's of course necessary to do book keeping, but let's at least be honest about what can not be captured by that.
> Novo Nordisk and Sanofi have seen huge gains as the list price of insulin has grown. The companies have collectively distributed a total of $122 billion to shareholders in the form of share buybacks and cash dividends over the period 2009-2018.
https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/who-benefits...
The only way it could happen is if Zuckerberg had a Bill Gates moment and decided to use his enormous personal wealth to at least try to do some good.
Meta had a stockpile of cash and Zuck took the bet with VR to be the "next big thing" and drive hype from investors. If it did pan out it would free him from Apple's and Google's grasp on iOS and Android.
Also, screw them for trying to co-opt the term "metaverse".
They want a "place" they control and monopolize to box people into and then feed them cack and discourage them from ever leaving. Like their "social" media products, but even more immersive and totalizing.
Just look at what Microsoft did with Hololens. They bought it, chafed at the thought of a couple billion dollars of additional capex to make it a viable product and dumped the entire project 20 meters from the finish line. If you're going to do something, do it with conviction.
Whose money is this? The company's money and investors' money. Let them lose it.
Should I be cheering for them to instead to spend that money on streaming rights? Buybacks? C'mon now.
Meta and VR is a good case study to keep in mind when people think only the government can be wasteful.
Big companies will hoover up very smart people and employ them paying big bucks basically moving protobufs around in more and exotic ways, and the IP they generate is kept inside (usually).
No one was able to come up with a mass-appeal killer app back then, and no has managed to do that this time around, either. No, "Beat Saber" is not it.
I imagine we'll see Apple throw in the towel first (like how they got out of the self-driving car space), and then Meta will be left holding the bag.
I want to clarify that the tech has improved, plus lots of us geeks will continue to buy and enjoy such devices, but it is not a Visicalc, nor an iPhone. Thus, the Gartner hype cycle hump is gonna tank very soon, and big players hoping to sell millions of units every month will have to exit this space.
fidotron•12h ago
But . . . their whole product direction in the last few years has been baffling, specifically "Meta Horizon" which is at best creepy, and at worst some nightmarish fusion of Microsoft Teams and the Wii Mii channel. They need to get this crap out of the way and focus on delivering experiences people might actually want.
jack_riminton•12h ago
juancroldan•12h ago
foobarian•12h ago
It's impressive that they still managed to brute-force a non-trivial size market for VR games. Having a headset used to be rare but nowadays at least in our neck of the woods everyone knows at least a few other people who "have a VR". Even if it's collecting dust it's still market penetration.
fidotron•12h ago
The big question is why so many of these things are collecting dust.
In my case a huge part of it is resistance to putting it on again to discover what new account/privacy requirements it has today, along with how they've rearranged the UI, when all I want to do is fishing and table tennis.
zemvpferreira•11h ago
foobarian•11h ago
smoothgrammer•11h ago
cableshaft•11h ago
They're the two games I keep coming back to the most, and both have a ton of varied and interesting content.
Making 3D puzzles in 3D space where you can twist and turn everything in 3D to see where things might line up and leave the pieces floating wherever you drop them is very compelling. And the puzzles themselves are sometimes animated and/or have dynamic atmospheric audio for some puzzles depending on what pieces you're grabbing. It's great.
That being said, they're both getting kind of old now themselves, at 4 and 5 years old.
zemvpferreira•7h ago
New platforms need killer apps like people need oxygen. VR just doesn't have one so far. Gorn got close-ish, Beat Saber got close-ish. That's that. For my money, it'll be something like Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes that makes VR go huge or it won't be anything at all.
delichon•11h ago
glenneroo•11h ago
I always get nauseous with games where I'm floating or that use fake movement e.g. running, flying, jumping, anything my body can't possibly be doing right now. I find teleporting to be the least bothersome, and vignetting sometimes workable (esp. if I look upwards more than at the floor as it's moving beneath me). I always check for games that they are labeled "comfortable"... there's been a ton of crazy indie stuff coming out lately using various creative forms of mixed reality/passthrough which are much easier on sensitive brains.
foobarian•11h ago
fidotron•10h ago
i.e. a fixed forward floating velocity is fine, but whenever it varies you throw up.
They had some rather extreme tests to demonstrate this phenomenon, and no one could last more than a second of one of them (bouncing around in a dune buggy) without tearing the headset off.
jerf•8h ago
I got into VR about six months ago with the Quest 3, and for a moment I wondered if all the talk of motion sickness was overblown, or maybe it didn't bother me. So I boldly downloaded a roller coaster simulator. Literally couldn't do more than about 10 seconds of it, even after setting up the blinders (which also effectively ruin the nominal experience anyhow).
So I do think the experiences are getting better about that over time.
However, the problem is, the resulting limitations are a pretty big deal in terms of game design. The VR industry really, REALLY wants to do first-person shooters. I mean, first person, it's almost right there in the name. But the technology that on paper is the very embodiment of "first person" also can't really do that. I've played a bit of Batman on the headset, with it set to 'normal' motion and navigation, and that rides the line of nausea for me, and Batman is really generally a slowly-moving character. I can't imagine trying to do a high-mobility FPS in the style of Quake 1. None of the "I really want to be a first-person shooter" games I've tried really quite work for me. (Have not tried Alyx, admittedly. Next sale. But even if that works, nobody else is copying it very well.)
So if you think of all the possible games, and then remove from them all the games that induce motion sickness, you've cut out rather a lot. Then you face the problem of, of the remaining games, how many of them are actually improved by VR? For instance, you can make a VR chess game, but beyond the initial "oh wow" of the 3D environment, chess is chess, and if anything the VR controls become an impediment versus the precision of the several paradigms for playing chess with mouse and touchscreen that already exist that are able to just fade away until you are just playing chess without thinking about the interface. The VR interface is always there.
The answer is absolutely not zero. Beat Saber, for instance, sure, nominally it could be done in conventional 3d on a 2d monitor and some motion controls, but the millisecond-by-millisecond kinesthetic experience is certainly a qualitative change in VR. It is The Game for a reason. But for VR to ever be more than just a niche, it is going to have to get to the point where it is nearly transparent. We're talking a "VR headset" that is basically the weight and encumbrance of conventional glasses. Maybe a thin wire that goes to a dedicated battery and external compute. If I had something like a dedicated shoulder pocket for that or something it might not be too bad. And we're a ways away from that still. And even then gaming is going to remain a niche unless someone finds a genre that works in VR, doesn't work well without VR, and basically doesn't involve motion through space, and I've got no more idea what that is than most game developers. I just can't entirely exclude its existence.
foobarian•11h ago
I have to respect how much they were willing to invest to try and break the cycle; for now it seems the headset count at least is nontrivial enough to get at least a handful of appealing games. Time will tell if that continues I guess.
(I found kids love to play Yeeps Hide and Seek. I would never in a million years suspect that would be a successful game. It's an MMO, and it has an interesting mechanic of defaulting to voice comms, which ends up with the kids forming an ingroup that rejects anyone who sounds "grown up". There are also levers to deal with griefing behaviors. I think is a great way to filter out the usual internet boogeyman the "creepy perv" types.)
sandworm101•11h ago
For me, it isn't the accounts but questioning whether some update in the last month has bricked the thing. Between updates to my OS, my graphics drive, the games, or VR hardware itself, I inevitably have to go through a period of turning things off and on again ... holding the headset or waiving it in front of the sensors as I wonder if it will connect properly. I tried to use it last week, but rage-quit when steam told me it had updates for the base stations. Just ... no. I have better things to do.
arnaudsm•11h ago
I wish they hadn't abandonned PCVR, and kept pushing the boundaries of the medium like Valve did with Alyx.
atrus•10h ago
Minecraft and pokemon have famously behind the times graphics and they've done well.
Beat Sabre and Gorilla Tag have done well on VR, and those are hardly crazy graphics.
Instead of Meta buying game companies and never releasing games, they should have bought those companies, seen how their pipelines looked for a successful release, and then developed software that streamlined those releases, making it easier for outside companies to release more and better games.
arnaudsm•10h ago
Although I've had a blast on Minecraft in PCVR (but you need strong VR legs)
atrus•10h ago
BobaFloutist•8h ago
Is it because the platform is more resource limited, so you have to find a way to squeeze high-quality graphics out of less compute? And I guess I don't know that much about the technology, but I assume they're sending slightly different images to each eye, which probably means they need to generate two pictures instead of one, so that might be a multiplier on the compute to get a given perspective?
I mean Nintendo is pretty well known for squeezing appealing and attractive visuals out of limited hardware, so I can totally see an argument for going for more BOTW/TOTK-style graphics than your CODs or your Gods of War?
sjsdaiuasgdia•8h ago
Yes, producing two camera views at a time and at pretty high resolution. You can get away with more resolution compromises on a 2D display sitting a couple feet from your eyes versus VR displays hovering just beyond your eyes.
BobaFloutist•6h ago
Or wait, even better: scan lines used to allow crts to do more with less. We should really look into using CRT displays for VR headsets
sjsdaiuasgdia•6h ago
I think the current real-world version of this is called an "IMAX theater". Not very portable though.
Beijinger•12h ago
spacebanana7•11h ago
This might sound expensive and wasteful, but it’s actually probably cheaper than the effort to improve gaming or hand tracking by a substantial amounts. Also more likely to drive unit sales.
elcritch•11h ago
spacebanana7•11h ago
chasd00•11h ago
spicyusername•12h ago
VR is still really in its infancy, but with Walkabout I really feel like I can see the vision, can feel what is coming.
I don't know what it is about that game, but something about the graphics and the gameplay really come together to make you feel like you're inhabiting the space with other people.
ashoeafoot•12h ago
mrweasel•11h ago
Oh and make it PS5 and Xbox compatible.
Gamers want to walk Skyrim, or the Fallout wasteland, but if it's just a set of goggles on your face then what's the point? You could just get a bigger TV.
I doubt that you can actually do it, with current tech, but $60B and we're no closer? It's still just a set of goggles.
polotics•7h ago
Der_Einzige•11h ago
We need spaces/buildings dedicated for this, and we need setups and headsets from manufacturers which acknowledge this situation.
We specifically need users to understand that VR really means VR + giant GPU in your backpack (or I guess laptop in this case).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DvB07X84HM
Seriously, this video came out 5 years ago, and nothing has improved what-so-ever with VR.
h2zizzle•11h ago
>Look at your hand.
>There is a virtual Pokéball/Yu-Gi-Oh card in it.
Something like that.
OR
I put on my headset, look at my computer/call for my NAS. I ask to see my photos folder. They appear around me as I'd configured previously: as a mass of images that I can manipulate as if they were real, but also if I were psychic. I wave one over, pluck it out of the air, gaze at it. This is way better than scrolling on a tiny phone screen.
OR
People don't know what they want yet. All they know is that the offerings so far don't appeal to them, being some combination of geek-niche and corporate blandness. One or two or three megacorporations cannot build and control the successor to the PC and smarptphone ecosystems in the heavy-handed manner that they've tried to. Make the tech cheap enough for everyone to get their hands on and easy to develop for (even if you don't get a cut of every single red cent that passes over the platform). Watch the public weave miracles for you.
markus_zhang•11h ago
Gigachad•10h ago
bentt•12h ago
lvl155•11h ago
sylens•11h ago
Zuckerberg knows this and saw VR as a potential platform that they could own moving forward. It's why they have invested so much in it, renamed the company, and played for keeps making deals with game developers to publish their games on their store. The problem is that VR is a niche that will never crossover to the mainstream until major problems are solved with the form factor and battery life. Nobody wants a headset strapped to their face for a prolonged period of time. Even the most hardcore of gamers see their headsets collecting dust after a few months.
fidotron•11h ago
I know rooms full of games industry business people that would die laughing at this suggestion. It's in the same league as talking about third party support on the Wii U.
sylens•11h ago
bentt•10h ago
apwell23•11h ago
I remember this was a big news a few years ago and stock was battered for a while.
How come it didn't seem to effect their bottomlines and stock prices now ?
BobaFloutist•8h ago
Do you know this from anything he or meta has explicitly said, or is it conjecture based on assuming rational behavior and working backwards to come up with the most plausible explanation?
Occam's razor still says to me that Zuckerberg just personally finds VR really cool and compelling, and decided to point his money-printing machine in its direction. Kinda like Musk and space or the Kochs and preventing local investment in public transit.
I really do think he just thinks it's neat.
karmakaze•6h ago