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Meta has sold nearly 20M Quest headsets, but retention struggles remain (2023)

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Re: Meta has sold nearly 20M Quest headsets, but retention struggles remain (2023)

#31

Headsets break any bit of social components from a shared screen. There is something to be said for 2-5 people sitting around and consuming the same content and (almost) the same view simultaneously. Maybe overtime we'll get used to it, and it will seem normal. For example, when the iphone was released, and the folks with iphones would stare at them in public and not talk to anyone. We would give friends a hard time…

I mean most videogames have dropped spit screen multiplayer from their featureset for years. Still a few holdouts I think.. mariocart/marioparty/smashbros I imagine .. though haven't tested all of those on the switch, i know kart at least still has ssmp and of course party. So that couch co-op/battle situation is already rarer than it used to be, and the games that support it skew younger or are indy (lovers in a dan…

> but able to see 'through it' and put eyes on their opponents physical forms.

Perhaps, but that's still putting a huge social distance between everyone, whether they're in the same room or not. It would be little different than a room full of people using their smartphones. You may be physically in the same place, but there's still a wall between everyone nonetheless.

Re: Meta has sold nearly 20M Quest headsets, but retention struggles remain (2023)

#32
Honestly, their hostility to pornography is hurting retention. I've been meaning to write an article about it but pornography is an incredible booster for VR tech.

Everyone watches it at some point, many multiple times per day. It's immersive and novel.

Even better, people are used to bridging perceived gaps in their head. By that I mean people care less about things like resolution or story or frame rate. As long as monkey brain sees skin the brain will do a lot.

There's also just a ton of content out there - professional, indie, and amateur content producers are (or were, last time I checked, which has been a while) pumping it out (no pun intended). Most of it can be found for free!

Meta has been spending a lot of money on VR, and I suspect a significant portion of that is getting mainstream content producers to do stuff in vr - NFL/UFC/etc. putting vr cameras at events, game studios spending time and money to port games to vr (i don't think bethesda would have done skyrim vr entirely on their own dime). With porn, you have tens of thousands of hours of VR content, growing daily, that most users are able to find for free. They'll come back daily for that.

The issue is the difficulty on quest. You can download one of the browsers and do it there, but last I checked firefox reality was dead and I couldn't get wolvic to work on my quest 2. Not sure if things have changed since I last checked but there just weren't a lot of options.

I get that they want to be the gateway to VR content on their devices so they can get a cut of it but it's not really helping. I'm also not gonna buy a VR device specifically for porn, so after having the quest 2 for a few years (and not using it for at least a year), I'm just gonna sit back and wait a couple generations. There are some good games but I feel like this is a field of dreams situation - if you build it they will come. Build a platform that lets people do non-illegal things in VR and they'll come.

Like right now no one is using VR for work. They're using it to 1. game, 2. watch porn, and a very far 3. is consuming other content like experiencing events in VR.

Embrace it! Unsure why this corporation has suddenly found morals but only for pornography. Think of how much money an onlyfans app would make esp. if they started selling VR cameras.

Re: Meta has sold nearly 20M Quest headsets, but retention struggles remain (2023)

#33

Retention is always tough for new technologies. I remember when 3D printers were having their big splash and people were buying them like crazy, once they did a few prints it lost all the allure. Same thing with VR, I'd imagine.

When people got or get a mobile phone the retention is 95% plus or something crazy like that.

John Carmack gave a really interesting talk a few years back when he talked about how the biggest opportunity for Quests was to get all the ones in a cupboard out and being used.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXmY26pOE-Y

(Disclaimer - I have a Quest 2 in a cupboard.... )

Re: Meta has sold nearly 20M Quest headsets, but retention struggles remain (2023)

#34
post #17

Is it unreasonably pedantic to want the title here to be "20MM" since the original post was "20 Million" and the "thousand thousand" abbreviation should be correctly used?

The symbol to denote a million is M according to the SI.

Re: Meta has sold nearly 20M Quest headsets, but retention struggles remain (2023)

#35

I have a Quest 2 and haven't touched mine in years mainly because of the set up procedure (which is common in VR headsets): I have to find available space first by moving furniture around, then I need to calibrate the headset to work in that space. After usage, I have to clean the device with wipes to make sure sweat doesn't cause bacteria to grow. If some of the items were addressed somehow, I'd be using it more fre…

The first issue is solved by Quest 3: 1) calibration is a matter of seconds, 2) it remembers all previously calibrated spots, so I basically never need to calibrate.

Yes, you need about 2m² space if you want to move/do fitness, but that's something no VR can solve.

Re: Meta has sold nearly 20M Quest headsets, but retention struggles remain (2023)

#36
post #17

Is it unreasonably pedantic to want the title here to be "20MM" since the original post was "20 Million" and the "thousand thousand" abbreviation should be correctly used?

20M is correct and I don't know why people think "million" should be abbreviated as "MM".

M is Mega, as in a Million. "thousand thousand" would be "kk".

Re: Meta has sold nearly 20M Quest headsets, but retention struggles remain (2023)

#37
post #27

> the company has to do a better job at keeping customers using the headsets well after their purchase I mean I understand that this is what these people are paid to say, but it sure strikes me as odd. I could be wrong but my assumption is that the honeymoon ends pretty quickly for VR headsets. No fault of Meta — they just went all in on the wrong horse. Saw a YouTube video yesterday — a guy finds a VR headset in a J…

How can you say "no fault of Meta" when their CEO was the worst imaginable pitchman for a VR future? VR wasn't a joke in the public consciousness until Zuck did his Metaverse presentation looking like a Nintendo Mii avatar from 2006.

I'm of the opinion that VR was/is always going to be a novelty.

Re: Meta has sold nearly 20M Quest headsets, but retention struggles remain (2023)

#38

I'd be open to another look at the device if the meta account requirement is removed to setup the device. It's still a nonstarter until that point.

Why? It’s already fully decoupled from all the other accounts (Facebook and such) and surely you see the need for some account, for a device with a market place?

Re: Meta has sold nearly 20M Quest headsets, but retention struggles remain (2023)

#40
post #17

Is it unreasonably pedantic to want the title here to be "20MM" since the original post was "20 Million" and the "thousand thousand" abbreviation should be correctly used?

20M is correct and I don't know why people think "million" should be abbreviated as "MM". M is Mega, as in a Million. "thousand thousand" would be "kk".

It's because in finance/accounting the MM is taken from Roman Numerals. I'm not sure why it's got magically implicit multiplication instead of the standard Roman Numeral reading (2000 for MM) but such is life.

Interesting, a thread from another article on this topic:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7451283

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