Facebook's Quest 2 is an impressive piece of tech.
One of the biggest reasons to be skeptical of VR taking off is that Facebook is one of the major players. Between the login shenanigans and their anti-competitive dealings with developers, they have an opportunity to single-handedly tank the industry.
It's the ONLY player on the "stand-alone" headset space.
There's some competition on PC headsets, Rift headsets are not even the best, feature-wise. But just like the quest, they score very high on the cost-benefit analysis (I guess we pay with a combination of cash and data).
I agree. For tech to take off you really need a significant "platform" player to emerge - someone that is able to position themselves as a middleman where the value made by 3rd parties significantly outweighs the value made by the middleman. That is what causes a technology to really bloom and get broadscale uptake. Facebook just isn't interested in that. They'd rather have a smaller pie where they own it all than capture a larger piece of a giant pie but be just one part of it.
For sure this is his play. My early take is that the VR/AR social experience is absolutely the killer app and will beat the pants off phone, chat, social feeds and video calls. It will be so good that it will be the default way to commutate at a distance, making it a huge threat to Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, and Messenger. I think the fufilment of that promise is still probably more than a decade out.
>For sure this is his play. My early take is that the VR/AR social experience is absolutely the killer app and will beat the pants off phone, chat, social feeds and video calls.
And that, IMHO, is why FB wants you to use FB login for your VR experience.
It's also the definition of disallowed monopolistic behavior -- using ownership of one area to control another. This is more egregious if you consider "VR" as not "virtual reality", but "virtual relationships."
Zuckerberg sees that it has the potential, and he wants to have an early angle of attack in case someone else innovates first.
Zuckerberg views platforms as chess pieces. He doesn't care what they are - he just wants the most valuable and strategic ones. He's not like a Musk that just builds or a Cook that refines product into a cohesive vision. Zuckerberg is playing war and finding the reverse salients. He's destabilizing and weakening the platform and expanding his reach. He's more like Bezos or Ellison.
I feel the biggest thing that FB brings to the table is multiplayer and social. Because their device is both capable, inexpensive, and easy to setup; it's the most democratic. I can almost always find others to play with or against compared to Steam, where only a few games have a lot of players.
One of the biggest reasons to be skeptical of VR taking off is that Facebook is one of the major players. Between the login shenanigans and their anti-competitive dealings with developers, they have an opportunity to single-handedly tank the industry.