Last fall, Meta-formerly-Facebook unveiled its Meta Quest Pro, a long-rumored, higher-end follow-up to the company's best-selling Quest 2 VR headset. The sleek device, which initially went on sale for an eye-watering $1,500, has really struggled to catch on since then, just as we predicted at the time. And, as Mixed Reality News reports, Meta is […]

Facebook’s VR Headset Not Selling, Literally Giving It Away::Last fall, Meta-formerly-Facebook unveiled its Meta Quest Pro, a long-rumored, higher-end follow-up to the company’s best-selling Quest 2 VR headset. The sleek device, which initially went on sale for an eye-watering $1,500, has really struggled to catch on since then, just as we predicted at the time. And, as Mixed Reality News reports, Meta is […]

  • LazaroFilm@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1002·
    1 year ago

    If I’m putting something over my head it won’t be from the greediest tech company ever.

    • phx@lemmy.worldEnglish
      277·
      1 year ago

      Meh. If they’ve still got some free ones to give out I’ll take it.

      But in all seriousness, the Quest 2 is pretty good hardware, especially for the price. The problem is that Meta tried to build an ecosystem around monetization and then bring people in, rather than building something that appeals to most people and still allows them to profit. Kinda the opposite of the Facebook model really, which became a defacto online community and kinda kept the monetization a little quieter or behind the scenes for a long time

      • Buddahriffic@lemmy.worldEnglish
        16·
        1 year ago

        They could release the best possible VR hardware that puts your body into a dream state and allows you to experience things fully in VR for $99 and I still wouldn’t touch it if meta, fb, or zuckberg has anything to do with it.

      • luciferofastora@lemmy.zipEnglish
        111·
        1 year ago

        I wonder: Did the people who successfully pulled off the Facebook strategy get replaced by dumber, greedier ones, did they get overruled by dumber, greedier decision-makers, did they get overconfident and thought their current market position would let Meta get away with it, or did they get lucky in the first place and fail to take any notes on why it worked?

        Corporations tend to run on “if it works, why change?” so mixing up your entire strategy to this degree seems like it must’ve been a deliberate decision. I’m just curious who made that decision, and by what reasoning.

        • LazaroFilm@lemmy.worldEnglish
          6·
          1 year ago

          Now they have to show rising numbers to shareholders quarterly. They can’t play the long game anymore. They need results every quarter, even if it sinks the company on the long run.

            • LazaroFilm@lemmy.worldEnglish
              71·
              1 year ago

              It works when the company is growing. But when it has reached 100% of their potential users, the only growth is greed and that’s where it fails.

              • luciferofastora@lemmy.zipEnglish
                2·
                1 year ago

                One of my favourite song lyrics regarding this is “wild growth is called cancer”* - growing is fine, but if you need to keep growing to sate investors’ demands for more and more profit, you end up doing more harm than good.

                The song is in German by a band named “Saltatio Mortis” (Latin: Dance of the Dead) called “Wachstum über alles” (German: Growth above all). You can probably guess the topic from this context.

        • Buffalox@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          or did they get lucky in the first place and fail to take any notes on why it worked?

          Yes.

  • dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️@lemmy.worldEnglish
    772·
    1 year ago

    Well, possibly people have finally been turned off by Zuck Zuck and his creepy-ass avatar doing their combined best to make his “Metaverse” pipe dream as cringeworthy as possible. Seems he can’t get it through his head that all we really want to do is play video games (and I guess maybe watch VR porn), and for $1500/999, we can buy an awful lot of game console with change left over for some games, or a pretty significant chunk of normal gaming PC.

    I think I’ll stick with my Reverb G2. I wouldn’t take a Meta/Facebook backed device, nor touch its ecosystem, if they paid me.

    • MrMcGasion@lemmy.worldEnglish
      16·
      1 year ago

      I’ve spent over $1500 on VR (HTC Vive, and Valve Index, plus some accessories for both). I’ve never been able to talk myself into even a Quest 2 for $200 back when they went on sale shortly before they raised the price due to “supply chain issues.” I enjoy VR experiences and I’m personally okay with paying enthusiast prices for hardware that improves the experience, but I want nothing to do with Meta/Facebook’s ecosystem, at any price.

      • Jastas@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        1 year ago

        This ^ That is all the same exact reasoning I thought of when I purchased my Valve Index this year. Sure, it’s older hardware at this point but I want nothing to do with Meta/Facebook’s ecosystem as well.

      • RaoulDook@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        What extras do you recommend for the Index? I have the standard kit with 2 base stations and controllers.

        • MrMcGasion@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          The big ones for me are a cover/replacement for the fabric face gasket, prescription lens inserts, and for long play sessions a fan insert for the headset can be a nice to have, but I don’t run mine all the time since sometimes it’s just adding noise. The face gasket has probably been the hardest thing to get right, since a lot of third-party ones either don’t have enough padding, or are hard to swap in and out, so I kinda prefer having a full extra magnetic insert so I can easily change between the original which is most comfortable for me, and something else that I’m less worried about sweating all over for more active games.

          • RaoulDook@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            1 year ago

            Those are good suggestions. I made prescription lens inserts for my wife by simply removing the ear-holder arms from an old pair of her glasses, just leaving the frame and lenses which fits well inside the lens area

  • Sanctus@lemmy.worldEnglish
    68·
    1 year ago

    We’re broke as fuck, we can not afford that shit. Money is better spent elsewhere than a VR “workstation”.

    • LazaroFilm@lemmy.worldEnglish
      141·
      1 year ago

      I’d use VR for work if I could afford it. But not from the take all you personal dada and sell it company.

        • KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          You could likely capture card your monitors and pipe them into a secondary PC, to then pipe into your headset. Assuming your limitation is a work PC unable to run VR for one reason or another.

          • AnAngryAlpaca@feddit.deEnglish
            5·
            1 year ago

            Great, now I can get even 3x the headache while fixing legacy code, using jquery UI and wearing a VR headset at work! /s

    • Secret300@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      11·
      1 year ago

      For real. Even if I did have enough money to go buy something that’s that much I’d rather get literally anything else

  • stigmata@lemmy.worldEnglish
    445·
    1 year ago

    This is the dumbest take on what’s happening. The Quest 3 is better than the Pro and it comes out next month. We don’t need the Pro anymore. Some of y’all need to use some critical thinking. Roblox also just recently got a lot of attention towards it from Meta; it’s not a coincidence these were Roblox devs that the Pros were given to.

  • paddirn@lemmy.worldEnglish
    37·
    1 year ago

    I wouldn’t take anything from Facebook, no matter if it was free or if I was paid to take it. They’re toxic as a service and as a company, I want nothing to do with them.

    • pomodoro_longbreak@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      6·
      1 year ago

      That’s the thing. Anyone who cares about cutting edge (read: flawed, unproven) tech is unlikely to be messing about on FB. More likely they do not associate any positive feelings with anything that you might chose to attach to FB.

    • Dkarma@lemmy.worldEnglish
      61·
      1 year ago

      No shit. The platform is basically just a string of rug pulls over your lifetime.

  • iHUNTcriminals@lemm.eeEnglish
    31·
    1 year ago

    No one is going to buy a pro VR set from meta, lol. That’s like going to an Apple Bees with $1000 instead of a Michelin Star restaurant.

    And what are people going to do with it…? Play the same Beat Saber they always have?

  • MataVatnik@lemmy.worldEnglish
    293·
    1 year ago

    The goal has never been to sell VR head sets, the goal is to have 1Billion people on VR. The money would come from the monopoly they would have over selling software through their app store. Same way Google and Apple have a monopoly on who sells through their app stores. This has been zucks stated goal from the start

    • limeaide@lemmy.mlEnglish
      4·
      1 year ago

      In my opinion, I think their goal was to control the platform. If you think about it, the amount of information that they can gather from users is wholly controlled by Google and Apple through their OS’.

      Apple and Google have continuously decreased the amount of information Meta can gather through their apps, and I think with VR they made a huge bet that would be the next platform so they jumped on the ship to make sure that this time they would be controlling the platform and not another company.

      I don’t think they want to make money through software, I think they want to make money through data collection. The amount of data they can gather from you just through the setup, is incredible. They can literally know your height and have cameras on at all times.

      I think VR can be successful, but I don’t think Meta will do it. I don’t think they’re be the ones getting the ball rolling at least. If anything their marketing and the bad name they gave to VR set things back. I think they’re too early and have a pretty bad brand image for people to trust them. I don’t think the hardware or the software support is there for things to fully take off either

      Also, wouldn’t their goal be to sell VR headsets? How would people buy their software without a headset? I think their goal was to sell headsets. Pretty sure they sold their budget headsets at a loss just to introduce people to the platform.

    • sugartits@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1511·
      1 year ago

      VR today is what 3D TV was 10 years ago: the fad has peaked and now the sales are starting to decline.

      It will still have it’s niche, but any mainstream audience will be getting over it pretty soon.

        • Blackmist@feddit.ukEnglish
          81·
          1 year ago

          It’s hard to compare the old Virtuality arcade machines to Half-Life: Alyx though. Just a shame that few games are really following Alyx into the future. It’s expensive to make a proper VR game (or indeed any big game), and the fact that there’s not an enormous number of headsets out there is hardly encouraging devs to make more.

          There’s other niches besides games. VR headsets would be pretty much the only way to watch 3D HFR movies at home, but nobody really seems interested in bringing them to the format. You can’t even get 3D 4K movies on Blu-ray. Plus wearing one for a three hour movie is likely to be tiresome.

          Modern VR has modern enemies, and those are price, space, and comfort.

            • Blackmist@feddit.ukEnglish
              4·
              1 year ago

              Well indeed.

              In terms of big full length walking around and shooting stuff VR exclusives, there’s pretty much just Alyx. Walking Dead Saints and Sinners is supposed to be decent. It’s in my library but I’ve never tried it.

              Plenty of smaller games like Beat Saber are fun and easy for anyone to pick up and play. They’ve got that Wii-appeal.

              Cockpit games like racing sims are an easy conversion. People have been raving about Gran Turismo VR.

              Astro-bot was decent but outside a few gimmicks there was nothing particularly VR special about it.

              It’s still in the enthusiast’s toy space right now. Not sure it will ever really get out of that phase at any price. It’s not something you go past in a shop and go wow, it’s something you have to try out, and in order to do that you’d already have to be vaguely interested in it.

            • RaoulDook@lemmy.worldEnglish
              32·
              1 year ago

              Blade & Sorcery, Into the Radius, Star Wars: Squadrons, Beat Saber, DCS World, Assetto Corsa (and several other racing sims), Battle Talent, Dragon Fist Kung Fu

              These are all awesome VR games that my kid and I play frequently on the Index.

      • no surprises@lemm.eeEnglish
        5·
        1 year ago

        I disagree. 3D TV is nothing compared to VR. VR is an absolutely incredible thing. It provided me the best gaming experience I’ve had in 19 years (from Hal-Life 2 to Half-Life Alyx) The issue is that you need a good headset and a very expensive hardware to enjoy it, few people can afford that. Because of that, there are not enough players and developers don’t want to spend money developing AAA-games for such a small market.

      • Dem Bosain@midwest.socialEnglish
        4·
        1 year ago

        I loved my 3D monitor when playing games like Fallout NV and Skyrim, because I could just sit down, put on some glasses, and play the game as normal. But I can’t get used to wearing a heavy, hot, giant pair of goggles to play a game. Plus the learning curve was entirely unnecessary, and the lack of any straight 3D support for existing games is unforgivable.

      • oatscoop@midwest.socialEnglish
        41·
        1 year ago

        I’ve found the idea that modern VR is a “fad” comes from people with limited VR experience. It’s not their fault, since cheap consumer VR like the standalone quest headsets is mostly limited to what amounts to the equivalent of mobile games – they’re toys.

        I own a relatively expensive setup and have experienced the top tier of what consumer VR has to offer: it’s incredibly impressive. But that also highlights the issues. Quality consumer VR is expensive, fiddly, and currently has an extremely limited/niche number of worthwhile games and experiences.

        The reality is the current tech is really the first generation of practical consumer VR with capabilities beyond “headache inducing novelty”. It’ll never replace “2D”, it still needs to come down in price, but it’s hardly a “fad”.

  • FiveMacs@lemmy.caEnglish
    296·
    1 year ago

    No shit…the day my occulus rift got bought and whored out by Facebook was the day I stopped using it.

    • dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      1 year ago

      Mine too. My OG Rift is still sitting in a box in my basement. I don’t even feel right selling it on, since I’d just be saddling the next user with the same bullshit.

      It’s fine anyway, since for the purposes I use it for my Reverb is much better.

    • banneryear1868@lemmy.worldEnglish
      11·
      1 year ago

      I kickstarted Oculus and I don’t even know where my CV1 is now. It was always a pain to use and made me motion sick, the immersive aspect could be cool but it was actually more of a pain being that closed off from your surroundings. The sensory immersion always seemed like a crutch for games that had no emotional or story component, or even good game mechanics, which is actually more important for immersion.

      It also didn’t provide a relaxing gaming experience for me. I like to sit back with a snack and a cup of tea and zone out on a game for a bit. With VR I either had to prepare beforehand, or have this weird thing where I had to remember where in the game world I had to reach to find my real world snack or drink. It’s also just an ordeal to take the thing on and off. A regular game just one button, go let my dog out, back in. VR it’s a chore just to get situated. None of them are comfortable for long term wear either, they all leave marks on your face, your eyes get hot in this weird way, it’s gross and distracting.

  • exohuman@programming.devEnglish
    22·
    1 year ago

    The Quest 2 sells fine. The Quest Pro is for an audience that doesn’t exist at $1500. Also, Apple’s VR headset might as well not exist due to how expensive it is.

  • iesou@lemm.eeEnglish
    17·
    1 year ago

    Ok I agree with all that sentiment, but in the article I only saw a $500 price drop, were they ever free or are you taking the world literally figuratively?

    • moormaan@lemmy.caEnglish
      13·
      1 year ago

      It is referring to that Roblox developer conference. But yeah, somewhat click baity as people might be hoping to get one for cheap.

  • WindowsEnjoyer@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    15·
    1 year ago

    Valve Index is much better device.

    Also Zucc can go fuck hinself. Maybe he will find a privacy, because he stores it in his asshole.