He also made the Oculus lineup so cheap by subsidizing the costs with selling your data, that many VR startups couldn’t compete. Now there’s only a handful of groups still making any VR gear. Immediately after that he killed all PC based VR, though you can still do it with an add-on cable or wirelessly (which sucks on most WiFi), as an afterthought.
This just locked everyone into the Oculus ecosystem and Facebook by extension, bricking more than a few headsets in the process. Now you either have to pay thousands to boutique VR outfits, or buy an Oculus and sell your soul to Zuckerberg for a cut rate product.
I hold Mark solely responsible for killing VR as a consumer product.
I wouldn’t be surprised if VR booms soon in a hyper-competitive environment like phones pre-2016. We already had a boom, but there was a tiny market for decent VR. Now that Meta, Apple, and Samsung are making decent headsets at different price points, it’s only a matter of time before Huawei, Xiaomi, and Oppo start doing crazy stuff that sells well. Hopefully, Valve and HTC become even bigger players as well.
I think VR is going the other way.
Zuckerberg killed VR with the metaverse…
he bought the perfect VR headset company and then made it very difficult to homebrew and sideload. Mark killed VR.
He also made the Oculus lineup so cheap by subsidizing the costs with selling your data, that many VR startups couldn’t compete. Now there’s only a handful of groups still making any VR gear. Immediately after that he killed all PC based VR, though you can still do it with an add-on cable or wirelessly (which sucks on most WiFi), as an afterthought.
This just locked everyone into the Oculus ecosystem and Facebook by extension, bricking more than a few headsets in the process. Now you either have to pay thousands to boutique VR outfits, or buy an Oculus and sell your soul to Zuckerberg for a cut rate product.
I hold Mark solely responsible for killing VR as a consumer product.
He made VR less accessible to companies but way more accessible to end users. I don’t think it’s fair to say that VR is dead yet.
In my mind, it’s in its death throes.
Zuckerberg killed competition and innovation in the industry.
I wouldn’t be surprised if VR booms soon in a hyper-competitive environment like phones pre-2016. We already had a boom, but there was a tiny market for decent VR. Now that Meta, Apple, and Samsung are making decent headsets at different price points, it’s only a matter of time before Huawei, Xiaomi, and Oppo start doing crazy stuff that sells well. Hopefully, Valve and HTC become even bigger players as well.