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

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 […]

WindowsEnjoyer ,

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.

raldone01 ,

Your username makes this comment way funnier to me. 🤣

WindowsEnjoyer ,

BTW I use Arch 🤫🤫🤫

RememberTheApollo_ ,

Looking for the place so I can have my free, “literally” given away VR headset.

reagansrottencorpse ,

I feel so dumb for buying an index, I barely use it.

bitsplease ,

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

float ,

Have you played Superhot VR? It’s one of my favorite VR games.

teichflamme ,

I like super hot but it’s really nothing like Alyx.

I’m in the same boat. I played a bit more of NMS in VR, but I am not seeing a lot on the horizon in terms of single player AAA games.

bitsplease ,

Literally the first game I ever played in VR, but it kind of stands as a good example of what I’m talking about. It’s literally almost a decade old and is still at the top of most people’s VR game lists. The VR gaming industry has stagnated big time.

And honestly what we need are more games like HL:A and (arguably) boneworks, real games, with a plot, characters, etc. Vertigo 2 is the only game I can think of that has come out recently that meets those criteria, and even that felt pretty cheap and unpolished

negativeyoda ,

Just realized that I don’t even see people clowning on Zuck’s VR fixation these days.

Chobbes ,

I think Twitter has just taken up all of the oxygen lately.

paddirn ,

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.

Dkarma ,

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

pomodoro_longbreak ,
@pomodoro_longbreak@sh.itjust.works avatar

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.

iesou ,

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 ,

It is referring to that Roblox developer conference. But yeah, somewhat click baity as people might be hoping to get one for cheap.

specfreq ,
@specfreq@lemmy.world avatar

You could not pay me… I’m not even mad at Facebook, fuck you so much Palmer Lucky!!!

dbilitated ,
@dbilitated@aussie.zone avatar

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

JeffCraig ,

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.

sentient_loom ,
@sentient_loom@sh.itjust.works avatar

I never knew it existed. It sounds extremely stupid.

sugartits ,

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 people will be getting over it pretty soon.

pineapplelover ,

The fad will past much like with the invention of internet.

SlopppyEngineer ,

VR was the future of entertainment when I was still in college, and I graduated in the previous millennium.

Blackmist ,

It’s hard to compare the old Virtuality arcade machines to Half-Life: Alyx though. Just a shame that few games are really following Alyx into the future. It’s expensive to make a proper VR game (or indeed any big game), and the fact that there’s not an enormous number of headsets out there is hardly encouraging devs to make more.

There’s other niches besides games. VR headsets would be pretty much the only way to watch 3D HFR movies at home, but nobody really seems interested in bringing them to the format. You can’t even get 3D 4K movies on Blu-ray. Plus wearing one for a three hour movie is likely to be tiresome.

Modern VR has modern enemies, and those are price, space, and comfort.

CaptainAniki ,

deleted_by_author

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    Blackmist ,

    Well indeed.

    In terms of big full length walking around and shooting stuff VR exclusives, there’s pretty much just Alyx. Walking Dead Saints and Sinners is supposed to be decent. It’s in my library but I’ve never tried it.

    Plenty of smaller games like Beat Saber are fun and easy for anyone to pick up and play. They’ve got that Wii-appeal.

    Cockpit games like racing sims are an easy conversion. People have been raving about Gran Turismo VR.

    Astro-bot was decent but outside a few gimmicks there was nothing particularly VR special about it.

    It’s still in the enthusiast’s toy space right now. Not sure it will ever really get out of that phase at any price. It’s not something you go past in a shop and go wow, it’s something you have to try out, and in order to do that you’d already have to be vaguely interested in it.

    RaoulDook ,

    Blade & Sorcery, Into the Radius, Star Wars: Squadrons, Beat Saber, DCS World, Assetto Corsa (and several other racing sims), Battle Talent, Dragon Fist Kung Fu

    These are all awesome VR games that my kid and I play frequently on the Index.

    DemBoSain ,
    @DemBoSain@midwest.social avatar

    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.

    oatscoop ,

    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”.

    nosurprises ,

    I disagree. 3D TV is nothing compared to VR. VR is an absolutely incredible thing. It provided me the best gaming experience I’ve had in 19 years (from Hal-Life 2 to Half-Life Alyx) The issue is that you need a good headset and a very expensive hardware to enjoy it, few people can afford that. Because of that, there are not enough players and developers don’t want to spend money developing AAA-games for such a small market.

    MataVatnik ,
    @MataVatnik@lemmy.world avatar

    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 ,

    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.

    maniel ,
    @maniel@lemmy.ml avatar

    Ummm I want one free!

    CatZoomies ,
    @CatZoomies@lemmy.world avatar

    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.

    malloc ,

    If it’s free; you are the product.

    stigmata ,

    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.

    Astroturfed ,

    Shut up and hate the zuck with the crowd. How dare you question the groupthink hate train.

    June ,

    Idk, I want those pro controllers

    LazaroFilm ,
    @LazaroFilm@lemmy.world avatar

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

    phx ,

    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

    luciferofastora ,

    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 ,
    @LazaroFilm@lemmy.world avatar

    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.

    luciferofastora ,

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

    LazaroFilm ,
    @LazaroFilm@lemmy.world avatar

    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 ,

    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.

    Not_Alec_Baldwin ,

    See: instant pot

    Buffalox ,

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

    Yes.

    Buddahriffic ,

    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 ,

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

    Nope nope nope.

    bezerker03 ,

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

    Guntrigger ,

    Surely that is the exact same thing?

    Callendor ,

    Yup its exactly the same

    bezerker03 ,

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

    grue ,

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

    Peppycito ,

    They tried to speed run the enshittification process.

    Kolanaki ,
    @Kolanaki@yiffit.net avatar

    I’ll take a Quest again for free. Gimme.

    VentraSqwal ,

    Should’ve gone to the Roblox developer conference lol

    Kolanaki ,
    @Kolanaki@yiffit.net avatar

    Oh that’s the catch? I have to be a Roblox dev? 🤢

    FartsWithAnAccent ,
    @FartsWithAnAccent@lemmy.world avatar

    Yeah, not even if you literally paid me. Fuck Meta/Facebook/Instagram/Snapchat/Oculus/etc…

    mrcleanup ,

    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.

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