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 […]

  • tabular@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1574·
    10 months ago

    I am interested in VR. Not interested in proprietary spyware and wearable webcam from Facebook :/

  • LazaroFilm@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1002·
    10 months ago

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

    • phx@lemmy.worldEnglish
      277·
      10 months 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.world
        English
        16·
        10 months 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·
        10 months 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·
          10 months 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·
              10 months 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·
                10 months 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·
          10 months 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
    762·
    10 months 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·
      10 months 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·
        10 months 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·
        10 months ago

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

        • MrMcGasion@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          10 months 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·
            10 months 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·
    10 months ago

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

    • LazaroFilm@lemmy.worldEnglish
      131·
      10 months 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·
          10 months 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·
            10 months 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.works
      English
      11·
      10 months 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
    435·
    10 months 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
    36·
    10 months 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
      5·
      10 months 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
      51·
      10 months ago

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

  • iHUNTcriminals@lemm.eeEnglish
    31·
    10 months 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·
    10 months 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·
      10 months 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.

  • FiveMacs@lemmy.caEnglish
    296·
    10 months 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·
      10 months 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
      1·
      10 months 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·
    10 months 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.

  • dbilitated@aussie.zoneEnglish
    21·
    10 months ago

    I find it so perplexing they released a “premium” version with barely improved resolution.

    • JeffCraig@citizensgaming.comEnglish
      31·
      10 months ago

      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.

  • iesou@lemm.eeEnglish
    16·
    10 months 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
      12·
      10 months 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
    14·
    10 months 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.