Live data from Hacker News

Meta Horizon Worlds on Meta Quest is being discontinued

communityforums.atmeta.com

111–120 of 281 posts

Re: Meta Horizon Worlds on Meta Quest is being discontinued

#111
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was at Intel for a while and there was one glaring problem - they have one product that spins off a huge amount of cash. This means a few things: First, that one product is really where the things that matter happen. But second, they have all this money and they don't know what to do with it, they can't spend it all on their core product because that looks terrible - they're already throwing off money, investing mo…

Sounds a lot like Google as well

But Google actually knows how to do research and how to apply it to products. Meta's AI research hasn't produced anywhere near as many state of the art products /revolutionary achievements.

Re: Meta Horizon Worlds on Meta Quest is being discontinued

#112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you blame them? They saw the huge success Fortnite was having in that space. Facebook's core competency is copying other successful products. Sometimes it works.

should have just bought epic then like they usually do

Indeed. Reportedly Epic was worth $31.5 billion in 2022. That's only ~1/3 what they spent on Metaverse.

Re: Meta Horizon Worlds on Meta Quest is being discontinued

#113
post #36
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Billions. Facebook has spent billions and billions over the past decade in VR. Starting with the Oculus merger and then in 2021 with the rebrand. 10 billion a year supposedly for the past 5 years now.

I kept saying to myself, they must be seeing something I'm not... I guess not

Sometimes it’s just a jobs program to keep people busy so that they can’t build something else that can threaten your business

Re: Meta Horizon Worlds on Meta Quest is being discontinued

#115
post #87
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Billions. Facebook has spent billions and billions over the past decade in VR. Starting with the Oculus merger and then in 2021 with the rebrand. 10 billion a year supposedly for the past 5 years now.

So, a fraction of the AI investments? It’s pretty clear where the focus is bow and who/what no longer has a future at Meta.

> a fraction of the AI investments

you realize 99% of those announced "investments" have yet to occur as recognizable transactions, correct?

Meanwhile, the barrel of $70b in metaverse waste was actually spent

Re: Meta Horizon Worlds on Meta Quest is being discontinued

#116
post #102
post #2

Interesting, cutting way back in the product they renamed the whole company for. They feel a bit directionless to me. They are still making money but even their AI attempt feels half hearted. I think they are really trying but I’m not sure they can build the engineering muscle to move in new areas with the brand damage they’ve sustained.

I'd like to think that the top minds working on AI have a higher purpose than to get the next generation hooked to a digital morphine drip. Serving soap cutting videos and giving teen girls body dysmorphia isn't a very compelling mission. Though I'm sure many are mercenaries and will work for whoever pays the most.

> I'd like to think that the top minds working on AI have a higher purpose than to get the next generation hooked to a digital morphine drip

The next 5 years are going to be very disappointing for you.

Re: Meta Horizon Worlds on Meta Quest is being discontinued

#117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds a lot like Google as well

But Google actually knows how to do research and how to apply it to products. Meta's AI research hasn't produced anywhere near as many state of the art products /revolutionary achievements.

I was thinking more of their primary revenue source / money printer being their ads business like Meta then they also spend billions from it on all kinds of other bets.

Re: Meta Horizon Worlds on Meta Quest is being discontinued

#118
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Interesting, cutting way back in the product they renamed the whole company for. It was clearly the wrong bet. He pumped something like $100B into the endeavour (Meta Quest / VR / Horizons) and it is just slowly dying as we speak. He has to give up on it, although I am sure it will be called a "pivot" into AR glasses.

There are some really good ar glasses for a couple of hundred dollars, I think they are going to end up really cheap and not the 100 billion investment that facebook needs.

Any you'd recommend or can point me to good reviews for?

Re: Meta Horizon Worlds on Meta Quest is being discontinued

#119
post #63

Maybe I'm just naive but I don't really understand discontinuing things like this. Like, unless there are like 100 people using this, how can it not be possible to just leave this running at like 0.5% of its former capacity. Just leave up like 1 server, collapse all of the DBs into one, and let these few autists have their stuff.

At a minimum, the app needs updates to handle breakages caused by OS updates. It needs moderators and other staff for legal reasons since Meta is large enough that there's always a significant liability risk for even a few users. It needs to interact with the main non-VR app unless they want to fully isolate it. Etc.

When I was at Google, I had many of these discussions about cost tradeoffs for products that were https://killedbygoogle.com/

Re: Meta Horizon Worlds on Meta Quest is being discontinued

#120
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I kept saying to myself, they must be seeing something I'm not... I guess not

Sometimes it’s just a jobs program to keep people busy so that they can’t build something else that can threaten your business

If this were remotely true, there wouldn't have huge layoff rounds. The opposite is true: they hire thousands upon thousands of people and teach them how to build scalable software, and then set them loose. I'm frankly surprised by the lack of competition, but I suppose that's gated at multiple levels (visas, personal risk, funding, network effects, etc)
Post reply on HN