2y ago

Facebook's VR Headset Not Selling, Literally Giving It Away

news.yahoo.com

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 […]

93 comments

- 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?
- Capitalism ruins everything.
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
  
  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.
  
  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.
  
  They tried to speed run the enshittification process.
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.
- $1500 also buys a lot of porn (or so I’ve heard) especially as free is a pretty low price.
- 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.
  
  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.
  
  What extras do you recommend for the Index? I have the standard kit with 2 base stations and controllers.
- Uh, the Pro wasn't aimed for that, you twit.
We're broke as fuck, we can not afford that shit. Money is better spent elsewhere than a VR "workstation".
- 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.
- 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...
- 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.
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.
- Shut up and hate the zuck with the crowd. How dare you question the groupthink hate train.
- Idk, I want those pro controllers
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.
- 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.
- No shit. The platform is basically just a string of rug pulls over your lifetime.
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.
Looking for the place so I can have my free, “literally” given away VR headset.
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.
  
  VR was the future of entertainment when I was still in college, and I graduated in the previous millennium.
  
  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 fad will past much like with the invention of internet.
  
  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".
No shit...the day my occulus rift got bought and whored out by Facebook was the day I stopped using it.
- 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.
- 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.
I find it so perplexing they released a "premium" version with barely improved resolution.
- The main problem with the Pro is that it completely fails at the thing it was primarily marketed for: AR passthrough.
  The cameras are so bad that when you use video passthrough, everything is blurry. It's completely unusable. No one will ever use it for productivity tasks in its current form. Meta should have just focused on making a high end gaming version because they failed at making it usable for anything business related.
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.
- I didn't even realize Apple had a VR headset
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.
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.
- Your username makes this comment way funnier to me. 🤣
  
  BTW I use Arch 🤫🤫🤫
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.
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.
You could not pay me... I'm not even mad at Facebook, fuck you so much Palmer Lucky!!!
Nobody wants to buy this generation’s Nintendo Virtual Boy.
- I want one! Just not from Zuck
  
  If it's really free then it's worth investigating to hack it to something open and privacy-respecting.
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
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.
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'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? 🤢

93 comments