Yeah, that’s it. It wasn’t having your fascist, boot-licking CEO show up wearing the stupidest looking shades that made investors cringe and look for the door. Cause we all know Zuck looks cool and people want to emulate him, right? He’s not a jackass in a curly mop.
Maybe next they should have Elon wear them. We can just go down the line having stupid-looking billionaires take turns modeling these things and suck the whole industry dry of any investor money by mid-year. Who should go third? Oh, I know! Sam Altman with his two popped collars. I can’t wait. What a trio of clowns. And that’s just who I thought of off the top of my head.
I’ve always been mildly interested in VR, but never wanted to invest in a data collector from Facebook. Maybe Valve can make me buy one of these.
The index is my favorite but it’s pretty dated. They just stopped production on the vive pro 2, and quest is technically the best bang for your buck but it is HOT GARBAGE to use with steam and support is actively harmful instead of helpful. Hopefully the deckard is good.
Honestly though vr is fantastic. Blade and sorcery, into the radius, Pavlov vr, contractors, literally any compatible flight sim. Truly not a gimmick.
I remember being excited for the Oculus Rift. Then Facebook bought it and my interest went to zero. Even now, whenever someone talks about different VR headests, everyone puts ‘Facebook’ in the negative column if it is from them.
I’m pretty excited about the new Steam VR heasdest that is fully self-contained, though. :)
I view VR adoption the same as IoT and smart home adoption; the greed and narcissism of capitalism killed the markets before they could even be established.
Just like I will never buy a monitor or TV locked to a specific corporation, I will never buy a VR headset that is not interoperable with any computer; especially one that requires an account, data harvesting or internet connection to operate.
Home Assistant is great for offline home automation and it’s open source!
Yes but you must buy stuff that is compatible with it, or use DNS tricks to make the stuff you have not phone home… It’s doable but definitely not painless. Also you must maintain your lights, on top of everything else…
Well yeah but if you get fully offline sensors you buy them and no subscription for the life of the hardware. More upfront work sure, but cost effective and best of all not dependent on a large monopoly tech company who will jack up rates every year
VR is a shining example of how westerners must waste their money on bullcrap instead of helping those who have less.
There will never be a point where the disparity in wealth shrinks because as soon as consumers have more, they spend more.
It depends to me. AR has some real value use cases in the trades imho. Assuming they can be OSHA certed and not a pain in the dick to wear while doing real work in unconditioned conditions.
Otherswise its just more screen realestate and “novel” data presentation. Both have value too, doing real work.
There is value in novel forms of expression too that avatars and creating 3d art too.
But yeah, advertising works and people dont just get what they need to create but get to consume. I cant find clit all in the first field in the consumer space, even the profesional space is pretty niche.
The latter has some but its really enthusists just making face game consoles work.
The last one though, that has some serious momentum, and for some good reason. Its not capital intesive, not compared to the first, and less niche then the second (cause lets be honest how much do most people need more screen or novel data presentation).
By a significant margin when compared to any other of the big-tech companies, buying hardware from Facebook seems like an unfathomably stupid idea.
And this is not me saying hardware from any of the rest of them is a good idea.
OpenAI: hold my beer
Is this a link to digg? lol
Here is the og article: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/24/metas-reality-labs-cuts-sparked-fears-of-a-vr-winter.html
Gods no. I’d be happy to see Facebook out of the VR market. I’ve high hopes for Valve’s new headset.
I’m concerned that Valve doesn’t really seem to be in it for VR, more of a “sit on your ass and play flat games on a virtual screen” thing. Maybe that’s the best way to get VR headsets in an average gamer’s home?
I could see barely-VR ports like NMS more common going forward, with fewer games made for VR specifically.
Also worth noting that meta funded a lot of studios even beyond their first party stuff. IIRC that includes games like Behemoth or Metro Awakening. That money drying up will definitely mean less VR games in total.
Perhaps they’re just marketing it with what’s available. The scope of VR games are pretty limited at the moment, and because VR headsets aren’t exactly ubiquitous, I can see why the work that’s being done is mostly done by enthusiasts. I personally have only really spent a decent amount with two games, Resonite and Dungeons of Eternity. One is a creative platform, honestly more of a game engine than a game, and the other’s an actual game.
I don’t really care about what Facebook did for the market, because ultimately they’re an evil company and I’d rather not have anything else to do with them. I get a gross feeling every time I put on my headset because I know that they’re sending as much data as they can back to their servers. I’d be more surprised if you could prove that they don’t have a complete 3D scan of my flat, including images, than if you told me they did.
Valve at least goes with FOSS, and builds on top of that. I won’t need to seek Facebook’s approval to install software on a device I paid for. That’s the very minimum I should expect as a consumer. Facebook doesn’t meet that expectation by a long shot.
Theres programs to run to strip out all their shit and use it as a pcvr device or with onmemory apps
Oh, like a ROM?
Yea it was a program I installed trying to get pcvr games to work while loaded on quest. Stopped the meta phone homes. Unsure if theres one for quest 3 if its still around
Getting Meta’s walled garden fingers out of the VR pie can only be a good thing, perhaps long term, but given Steam Frame incoming, probably not.
I don’t want to see VR fail, but I do want to see Meta fail.
side note: saw my first meta glasses yesterday, I didn’t like being recorded in that way.
I was commenting a year or so back on the decline of the titles-released-per-year of VR titles on Steam.
https://steamdb.info/stats/releases/?tagid=21978
That’s been going on for some time, not looking really healthy.
That’s largely a result of facebook buying up a bunch of vr dev companies and making them release quest exclusives. I’d be curious to see what titles released per year looks like if you include all platforms.
Yeah I had the same thought.
