At the last minute, Meta decides not to kill Horizon Worlds VR after all
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Last I saw sometime last year Meta was about 6 times the purchase price of a nuclear-powered supercarrier in the hole with nothing to show for it over the "Metaverse", what's that up to these days?
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If I was spending the morning getting ready for what amounts to a public media appearance, I would intentionally wall myself off from making consequential business decisions. This doesn't read bold to me--it reads flailing and bird-brained. SQUIRREL!
But I've been accused of being more of a checker than a doer.
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We can't rule out the possibility that it was more of a "Zuck having a midlife crisis about not being Hiro Protagonist wrapped in a pitifully weak business case" thing.
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Yeah, Mark tried on a DK1 and had a vision of the future. It's one of the leading symptoms of billionaire derangement syndrome - they confuse everything that occurs to them with brilliant ideas, and the sycophants that surround them don't contradict them.
Does anyone remember Internet.org?
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Resistance
Wise, Aged Ars Veteran
This is the company whose response to one of their studios games having a lot of cheating of PC users, was to discontinue the PC version of the game. (POPULATION: ONE), deeply unserious.
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Oh shit, they cut off the PC version? No idea; I hadn't played VR for a few years, but Pop: One was a good game. That's really nuts.
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One doesn't even have to be a billionaire for that to be the case. It was 2008 when I made up my mind to quit my job while in a cross-department meeting where the VP I reported up to, who had just returned from an all-expenses paid vacation at IBM headquarters, announced "Our future is on Second Life."
That guy's resume is one good-paying VP job after another, with essentially no accomplishments to explain how he got hired into any of them.
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It is impossible to communicate how much Horizon Worlds sucked. I still remember getting a college Facebook account and having magical connections unlocked. Horizon VR was the opposite of that. Just horrendously bad, janky, and not fun.
Here’s some anecdata: my kid wants to spend $8 a month on a Rec Room VR subscription to have premium skins to play with his friends (not gonna happen). He quit Horizon VR within minutes and I don’t think I could pay him to play it again.
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Resistance
Wise, Aged Ars Veteran
You can still play it if you own it, I was literally considering buying the PC version in case I got the steam frame. I was too late, I regret not buying.
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It's a crosswanking exercise. Once you get into the club, that's it. The list goes on and on. Who here remembers Ms Fiorina, for example? Or the other lady who was taking care of Yahoo? Mr Meyer was her name?
And the list goes on and on... and you don't need to stop at the C-level or VP-level. A serial butt-grabber, director, at a place I worked at for many years, ended up being fired for "performance issues" after years of complains and a very public fame, and ended up at another big company with even more money.
These people always fall up and their peers rate them well at the reviews no matter how awfully you perform. If your department goes well, it's thanks to you. If it doesn't, it's someone else's fault, and your fellow VPs will agree with you. It's the glass ceiling.
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It was also never going to work as soon as Wall Street saw it as a naked money grab.
What if we took the real life housing scarcity problem—and imported into the Land of Infinite Fun of VR where there’s no such thing as scarcity!! Wouldn’t that be an amazing money making opportunity everyone would love to have inflicted on themselves when trying to relax??!
Virtual reality estate speculation and shopping were their grand use cases for it. Of course it flopped. Why would I want to buy and use VR goggles to shop for toilet paper…when Amazons app has a BUY NOW button on my phone?
The truly hilarious part? Wall Street economists estimated the Metaverse was, and I’m not making this up…a $30,000,000,000,000 economic opportunity just a year before it collapsed
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Yeah, now they’ll just kill it off without prior warning. This is clearly an attempt to try and save face from everyone egging on them since they announced the VR version was shutting down.
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Yes, because tech companies and especially meta are so known for listening to user feedback.Samuel Axon said:
I think they saw some trending hashtag on X-Com and wanted a similar name to ride the trend.
Say what you will about the hit The Lawnmower Man film series, but even though I've never seen any of the films or played the Mega Drive experience, I could still recognise it as TLM even though I've not thought about it for ages.
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That’s probably most likely given the tendency these tech bros have to read Snow Crash as a positive vision of the future humanity should be building rather than as a dystopian satire.
However, it’s also possible he played Persona 5 and decided that attempting to invoke the God of Control was a very on brand move.
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I wasn't expecting it to last very long, since as Hollywood would say, it didn't have legs.
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At that same company where the VP worked my friend got fired for reporting blatant sexual harassment corroborated by many witnesses. Three months later the senior manager doing the harassing resigned for personal reasons and was into a comparable job within six weeks.
HR's job is to protect the company at all costs and if that means firing the person reporting the harassment then they'll do it without hesitation.
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This was shared in the Ars Slack this morning and I smirked.
- https://bsky.app/profile/comraderobot.bsky.social/post/3mhdwwquzi22i
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Alternate and more accurate headline "Meta continues to flounder in everything related to the metaverse idea put forward by Mark Zuckerberg when he was on ayahuasca"
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How about...Microsoft was instead called WindowsME? Or perhaps WindowsCE?
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It does seem like an awful lot of effort and expense just to avoid signing up for VRChat.
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Always liked when people referred to Windows CE as wince, sorry, WinCE.How about...Microsoft was instead called WindowsME? Or perhaps WindowsCE?
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Bob. Just Bob.How about...Microsoft was instead called WindowsME? Or perhaps WindowsCE?
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Meta waffling between continuing to throw 40' TEUs worth of cash down the metaverse hole or to throw them down the AI hole. Gotta admit, it's a tough call.
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I saw two companies get close to making it work: HTC and Microsoft.
HTC had a Viveport subscription service that included a very detailed overworld where you could walk around and see game demos, and was eventually supposed to allow seamlessly walking in and out of games. They never made it work.
Microsoft had a great virtual home for Windows Mixed Reality where you could play with furniture, and hang still images of games son the wall a la Mario 64 and then play. But it would reset your space every update and then they nuked WMR.
I think many people would play something like Virtual Animal Crossing with embedded games like the NES titles in AC. That’s essentially what Rec Room and VRChat are now, with very mediocre games.
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The people I knew who were tasked with marketing it felt like they'd had their legs cut off before it was even available for purchase. Kind of a prefiguring of the Metaverse, I guess.
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Meet the Open Metaverse Browser Initiative! https://metaverse-standards.org/news/blog/introducing-open-metaverse-browser-initiative/
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