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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 […]
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We’re broke as fuck, we can not afford that shit. Money is better spent elsewhere than a VR “workstation”.
I’d use VR for work if I could afford it. But not from the take all you personal dada and sell it company.
I would use it for work, except our tech stack is still stuck in the 1990s…
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.
Great, now I can get even 3x the headache while fixing legacy code, using jquery UI and wearing a VR headset at work! /s
For real. Even if I did have enough money to go buy something that’s that much I’d rather get literally anything else
For that price I can buy a used ThinkPad AND set it up for work in a literal strip club. Thats the price tag.
I’d also like to subscribe to strip club management tips, please.
I am intrigued by your message and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
Also their cheaper option is great for 1/3 or less of the price
And for 500 it’s getting even better than all other options next month.
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?
It is referring to that Roblox developer conference. But yeah, somewhat click baity as people might be hoping to get one for cheap.
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
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.
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If I’m putting something over my head it won’t be from the greediest tech company ever.
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
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.
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.
Capitalism was a mistake. The only innovation it breeds is how to exploit things for money.
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.
See: instant pot
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.
or did they get lucky in the first place and fail to take any notes on why it worked?
Yes.
They tried to speed run the enshittification process.
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.
Iirc these headsets require your Facebook login to function at all?
Nope nope nope.
They fixed that. Still need to make a meta account but it’s not Facebook.
Surely that is the exact same thing?
Yup its exactly the same
Yes and no. The Facebook thing was upsetting folks mainly because they would get banned from Facebook and lose their oculus.
Needing any account to use hardware I own is a 100% deal-breaker.
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Ummm I want one free!
I definitely would not. I have opted out of Facebook’s insidious and predatory algorithm, platform for spreading misinformation, and anti-consumer micro violations in privacy which culminate into a prodigious amoral corporation that abuses human rights. And they want me to put a headset on and join their ecosystem? Fuck that.
If it’s free; you are the product.
I am interested in VR. Not interested in proprietary spyware and wearable webcam from Facebook :/
Capitalism ruins everything.
Soon enough they’ll start recording your brainwaves tol
Elongated muskrat licks its lips in the distance
What company can you see doing it right?
Looking for the place so I can have my free, “literally” given away VR headset.
No shit…the day my occulus rift got bought and whored out by Facebook was the day I stopped using it.
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.
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.
Just realized that I don’t even see people clowning on Zuck’s VR fixation these days.
I think Twitter has just taken up all of the oxygen lately.
I’ll take a Quest again for free. Gimme.
Should’ve gone to the Roblox developer conference lol
Oh that’s the catch? I have to be a Roblox dev? 🤢
I never knew it existed. It sounds extremely stupid.
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.
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”.
The fad will past much like with the invention of internet.
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.
VR was the future of entertainment when I was still in college, and I graduated in the previous millennium.
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
Yeah, not even if you literally paid me. Fuck Meta/Facebook/Instagram/Snapchat/Oculus/etc…
It’s too bad because the hardware and software so far have been on point. The moment Facebook bought Oculus, I knew it was over, at least for me.
I feel so dumb for buying an index, I barely use it.
I don’t really regret it, because it was a truly awesome experience while it was fresh, and I probably sunk hundreds of hours into it over the pandemic. But yeah, it does get old surprisingly quickly, and there are literally no new games for it that aren’t arcade-style trash from the past few years.
Sadly, I think HL:A was the peak of VR gaming, and it’s all been downhill from there.
Maybe when standalones get powerful enough that they can run “real” games, it’ll kickoff again, but I don’t think I’ve put on my headset in months at this point, and there’s nothing on the horizon that’s likely to make me grab it again any time soon
Have you played Superhot VR? It’s one of my favorite VR games.
Literally the first game I ever played in VR, but it kind of stands as a good example of what I’m talking about. It’s literally almost a decade old and is still at the top of most people’s VR game lists. The VR gaming industry has stagnated big time.
And honestly what we need are more games like HL:A and (arguably) boneworks, real games, with a plot, characters, etc. Vertigo 2 is the only game I can think of that has come out recently that meets those criteria, and even that felt pretty cheap and unpolished
No it’s “literally” been reduced to $1000.
And now, as Mixed Reality News reports, Meta is literally resorting to giving them away for free: Attendees of this year’s developer conference for the global gaming platform Roblox each got a free Meta Quest Pro
