[NBJack]

Can say with certainty that it's on fire alright, in the sense that the ad data is burning away.

The rapid innovation is a survival tactic. They know the ads boat is sinking, and unlike other tech companies, they don't have much diversity in their revenue. Hence the Metaverse, AI, etc. which although neat, are not exactly making the same level of money for the organization (at least not yet). In Q4 2023, ads had a revenue of ~$38B, while the Quest revenue was a loss of $4B. AI hasn't been directly monetized directly, so it's harder to say how that's doing.

Given how critical good data is to a model, I'm not optimistic this will work for them.

[riskable]

It's sad, really: Meta could be making amazing VR headsets and transforming the way people use them by making them more general-purpose (like PCs) but instead they're making VR headsets into toys. Even the Quest Pro, which was meant to be for business use, was a locked-down, hard-to-hack (aka hard for developers to fully utilize) Android toy. And when I say "toy" I mean, it's the software equivalent of a hard plastic device with tamper-resistant screws and "no user serviceable parts" intent.

Their dead-set focus on data collection and advertising is sabotaging their ability to make (potentially billions in) revenue from traditional models. I know Zuckerberg and many other CEOs want their "core business" to be just one thing with all the other businesses being offshoots of that one thing but the reality is that they've become too big for that. Zuck needs to give up on the idea of, "our business is data collection and targeted ads for consumers" and realize the truth: Their business is technology.

[PaulHoule]

Personally I miss a lot of features in the Meta Quest 3 which would be helpful for making location based experiences (turn your local natural history museum into "Jurassic Park") such as having a persistent SLAM model and being able to at least use the camera to read and locate QR codes or, say, compute the pose of a person and overlay them with a video game character. I think though Meta is worried about the privacy implications of those things.

On the other hand, those LBEs have an antagonistic relationship with headset adoption. If everybody had a headset than there would be nothing special about MR experiences. For LBEs to be viable you want headsets to be capable and inexpensive but not widely adopted. (I almost wish it could be Winter 2024 forever) I'd imagine a headset vendor would like to charge me more for using a headset for an LBE than they would want to charge a ordinary user but on the other hand people who are blown away by an LBE (very possible) might go home and buy their own headset.

As for their vision, Meta seems to be doing really well running an app store for single-player games. I haven't seen a real multiplayer hit yet but I guess Demo Battles comes close. Meta knows what they'd like to do if they could create something like OASIS from Ready Player One but a close analysis of how Horizon Worlds falls short of that reveals how difficult that is. I guess anybody who can afford a seat of Dassault 3DExperience can also afford an AVP, maybe many Blender users can afford an MQ3. It's not clear to me at all what, past games and entertainment, is going to be a mass market in XR.

[ysofunny]

because they wanna get into the video game business

alas, microsoft owns that space

[riskable]

Actually, Valve owns that space. They have 132 million active monthly users. For comparison, Xbox has 120 million. Seems like only a minor lead until you look at the revenue: Steam (Valve) brings in ~$8 billion in revenue whereas Xbox brings in ~$4 billion.

Microsoft's operating overhead with Xbox is also vastly greater than Steam. Supposedly they make ~$28 every time they sell an Xbox One. That's based on just the manufacturing/parts cost of the hardware and doesn't include the costs associated with developing the hardware itself where they don't just take off-the-shelf chips and throw in an existing OS (like the Steam Deck) but instead custom-engineer a processor/architecture and make their own custom operating system.

[PaulHoule]

If anybody wanted to take a dominant place in the industry they’d buy Valve but Valve is not for sale. For instance, if Gamestop has bought Valve at the top they’d have an answer to the problem of digital downloads eliminating both the buy and sell sides at Gamestop.

[ysofunny]

yea, you're technically correct

what I was trying to say is that microsoft owns the developer space, Valve has been a tough contender but also, microsoft has never gone straight against valve probably because the business wigs consider videogames less important than microsoft's other businesses.

so I should have said that while Valve may own the marketplace (the "app store") microsoft still owns what it takes to make a game in the first place. which is why facebook doesn't really stand a chance against MS. this also explainss how it came to pass that nobody cared about zuckerberg's metaverse... the metaverse didn't get access to the really cool graphic engines

[PaulHoule]

Developer space? Isn’t that like Unity, Unreal, everybody except Microsoft?

I think the whole point of XBOX, GAME PASS and all that is to convince people who don’t play games (stock market analysts) that Microsoft is relevant. It’s vice signalling.

[ysofunny]

Meta should buy (merge with, gobble up) Valve

I bet Microsoft would hate this

[robotnikman]

Please no. Valve is doing fine on its own as a privately owned company.

[ysofunny]

I'm not saying it'll be good for people, users, and gamers. but my business intuition says it's a good corporate move

[treyd]

What good do you suppose would come of that?