Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Meta Horizon Worlds on Meta Quest is being discontinued

communityforums.atmeta.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 281 posts

Re: Meta Horizon Worlds on Meta Quest is being discontinued

#81

Post by bee_rider »

Raed667 wrote: post #36
kemotep wrote: 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

VR games are actually kind of neat and fun. But it’s too much of a hassle to set the thing up every time and, I dunno, the association with Facebook is too icky.

It would have been really interesting to see what Oculus could have become without getting bought. I do think they were a little neat idea, not at all ready for Facebook sized projects.

Re: Meta Horizon Worlds on Meta Quest is being discontinued

#82

Post by cubefox »

jeffbee wrote: post #49

Second Life, which contains only niche perverts, has more concurrent actives than Horizon Worlds.

VRChat also seems to be used only by niche perverts. Perhaps only niche perverts are currently interested in the Metaverse, and Horizon Worlds failed because it didn't cater to niche perverts.

Re: Meta Horizon Worlds on Meta Quest is being discontinued

#83

Post by aaronbrethorst »

mosura wrote: post #41
xd1936 wrote: post #4

Unbelievable. They re-architected the whole operating system around this stupid app. They discontinued their previous homescreen environments in favor of trying to promote Horizon Worlds, only to discontinue the blasted thing anyway? After all of those millions of dollars spent trying to make virtual events happen?

The usage numbers probably reflect what happened in this house: since the pestering to confirm age and the horizon worlds update the Meta VR devices have literally not been recharged. They had the foundation of something half reasonable at one point, but their product management clearly got in the way.

but their product management clearly got in the way

I'm pretty sure the buck stops with Mark Zuckerberg.

Re: Meta Horizon Worlds on Meta Quest is being discontinued

#84

Post by mosura »

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #83
mosura wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The usage numbers probably reflect what happened in this house: since the pestering to confirm age and the horizon worlds update the Meta VR devices have literally not been recharged. They had the foundation of something half reasonable at one point, but their product management clearly got in the way.

but their product management clearly got in the way I'm pretty sure the buck stops with Mark Zuckerberg.

Zuckerberg wants a cyberpunk future, not some 3D immersive HR department on your face.

Re: Meta Horizon Worlds on Meta Quest is being discontinued

#85

Post by riskable »

LorenDB wrote: post #39
bhouston wrote: post #7

Okay, how long until Meta Quest is discontinued/sunset? I believe there is no expectation of a Meta Quest 4 right?

Meta has very recently had leaks of an upcoming lightweight headset. So maybe not a Quest 4 as a direct successor to the Quest 3, but a new headset is in the works.

Rumor is it that the focus of this new headset is AR. Not VR.

So once again they're making a stupid business decision based on wishful thinking.

Exec 1: "Surely, people will want to wear this headset all day while they work! Because the only reason why anyone would NOT want to do that is the weight of the thing!"

Exec 2: "Exactly! Gaming makes us a lot of money—and it's the only reason anyone ever bought our VR headsets—but imagine how much more money we could be making from business customers/apps that currently have no need for such devices. If we build it, they will come though! Can there be any doubt?"

Exec 3: "Not to mention that the data we collect from gamers has almost no value! We need to be collecting intimate details about everyone's lives, not their best Beat Saber scores!"

Exec 4: "You know what? Let's get rid of the controllers entirely. Sure, they're absolutely 100% necessary for decent gaming but I seriously doubt the business applications of AR that we're pretending is a $100 billion market won't need it."

Exec 5: "I'm concerned that end users will be able to do what they want with OUR devices that we're so graciously selling them the privilege to use. We need to ensure they're NOT at all like generic PCs that allow anyone and everyone to run whatever software they want and attach 3rd party hardware. It's not like such capabilities of general purpose hardware were what set off the PC revolution or anything!"

Re: Meta Horizon Worlds on Meta Quest is being discontinued

#87

Post by michelb »

kemotep wrote: post #26
xd1936 wrote: post #4

Unbelievable. They re-architected the whole operating system around this stupid app. They discontinued their previous homescreen environments in favor of trying to promote Horizon Worlds, only to discontinue the blasted thing anyway? After all of those millions of dollars spent trying to make virtual events happen?

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.

Re: Meta Horizon Worlds on Meta Quest is being discontinued

#88

Post by riskable »

renewiltord wrote: post #56
rhcom2 wrote: post #14

The most obvious and expected outcome to everyone except Zuck.

Zuck has become a very rich man avoiding all the obvious and expected outcomes. When Facebook stock hit its low a few years ago, HN was explaining why it was doomed. The man has founder mentality at the helm of a trillion-dollar company. It is no wonder he is what he is.

They just used their war chest to buy a bunch of companies to diversify their revenue stream. It's not like Meta made some massively profitable innovations or new services.

Re: Meta Horizon Worlds on Meta Quest is being discontinued

#89

Post by atrus »

Despite the shock at the amount of money meta spent on their version of the metaverse, I don't think they spent nearly enough to accomplish their vision.

Meta, to the detriment of the market, tried too early in the VR lifecycle to own the market. They basically tried to become the iPhone and Apple in the year 1990.

Tell me, do you believe any singular company in the year 1990, with 100B to burn, would be able to create the iPhone, in any of its varations? Absolutely not, there too much research, too much to invent, too much to program and not nearly enough talent and money for one company to manage.

Re: Meta Horizon Worlds on Meta Quest is being discontinued

#90

Post by Traster »

tyleo wrote: 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 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 more probably just makes your company look bad (you're spending more to get the same revenue). SO instead you have to take that money and make bets. But not just any bets. You need a bet that (a) matters if it pays off, and (b) looks favourable compared to the core business. So you buy Mcafee and Altera and MobilEye, 5G was the future once...

So to take the Meta example, they need something that is going to have revenue upside similar to Meta advertising revenue (one of the most profitable things in the universe), and that has better margins that the advertising business (basically impossible).So the only logical thing to do is to make grotesquely large bets on things that are extremely speculative. You can't bet on things that are well known - because nothing known has the properties from earlier that you're looking for, and you can't bet small because you've got to convince people you're the pay off is of a similar size to your existing business.

In Intel's case they lost focus on the core business and so that died and their other bets didn't matter because the core business was dead. With Meta the core business in't dead, but it's only a matter of time before it's seriously threatened and so they're going to attack that threat with everything they've got - and they have a tonne of resources.

Post reply on HN