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
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    1011 year ago

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

    • @phx
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      201 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
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        161 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.

        • @Not_Alec_Baldwin
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          101 year ago

          Iirc these headsets require your Facebook login to function at all?

          Nope nope nope.

          • Bezerker03
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            21 year ago

            They fixed that. Still need to make a meta account but it’s not Facebook.

              • @Callendor
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                31 year ago

                Yup its exactly the same

              • Bezerker03
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                11 year ago

                Yes and no. The Facebook thing was upsetting folks mainly because they would get banned from Facebook and lose their oculus.

            • @grue
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              61 year ago

              Needing any account to use hardware I own is a 100% deal-breaker.

      • @[email protected]
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        101 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
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          61 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.

          • @[email protected]
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            71 year ago

            Capitalism was a mistake. The only innovation it breeds is how to exploit things for money.

            • LazaroFilm
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              61 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.

              • @[email protected]
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                21 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
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          21 year ago

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

          Yes.