Don't expect them to pull the plug. Zuckerberg recently stated that he didn't expect VR to be profitable for some time.

He also committed to spending 3 Billion more on VR development over the 10 years!

http://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/mark-zuckerbe...

First, you didn't count the 5,000,000 Gear VR headsets, which are co-produced with Oculus.

These numbers, if accurate, are prior to the massive price drops from this summer. There was a huge spike in sales, with Oculus struggling to keep up supply (it took a few weeks to actually get my own order).

Unless the numbers were an order of magnitude lower, I doubt Facebook would be pulling the plug any time soon.

Those are low numbers for everyone involved.

I think this is a longterm space that Facebook is definitely not interested in missing out on, so they'll keep it going.

How much does it cost really, in the scheme of things? If anything, I don't know why Facebook simply doesn't ante up and steal some of the talent away from the competitors, they have the cash to do it and I'm sure people would be happy to work under Carmack.

Check out this blog post by Michael Abrash, Oculus' chief scientist, that was posted a few days ago: https://www.oculus.com/blog/inventing-the-future/

It's clear that Oculus are spending a lot of money on research, and have recruited a lot of people. A key quote from the article is:

"I signed up to build a 30-50 person research team. Oops. Orders of magnitude matter."

So there's at least a few hundred people just in the research team, and probably a lot others in regular product engineering as well. I think it's clear Facebook are pouring a lot of money into Oculus.

they tried throwing around their weight in the VR game market by attempting to lock developers into Oculus Exclusive deals in exchange for a fat facebook check, backfired.

> I don't know why Facebook simply doesn't ante up and steal some of the talent away

To what end though? Say they could spend $10 million and quadruple the resolution, halve the price, and reduce the barf factor of a Rift v2 in a year. What then?

They would probably be better off funding a bunch of people to try to find something compelling to do with the current generation of hardware. It's cool for some types of games, but a market that's a subset of a subset isn't going to set the world on fire. It's easy to come up with a cool demo and hard to come up with a good application.

> They would probably be better off funding a bunch of people to try to find something compelling to do with the current generation of hardware.

As a completely separate peripheral? Generally speaking most external peripherals sell to niche markets.

I was thinking more about some compelling application. The current generation of headsets is pretty neat.

In the current form factor, I just can't see it moving beyond a gaming peripheral anytime soon and the market for that is limited. I was excited when Facebook got into this because appealing to everybody is what they do. But there's been nothing.

I'm starting to think VR is a dead end. There is a market for it, but maybe it's not very big.

They made the horizontal strategy clear.

Expect VR assets in the Facebook feed, and this to slowly bleed into AR items.

That's the thin end of the wedge for wider adoption.

> Expect VR assets in the Facebook feed

Like what? I've been thinking about this and I'm having a hard time coming up with something that would get my relatives to buy a headset.

They have a new 3D object content type for the feed, which can be rotated and such by tilting your phone; has some support for AR using the phone camera. The assets come from their modelling app and such.

Full WebVR content will follow. They're easing the masses into VR via changes to the feed.

These numbers are as of March 2017, this summer has seen rapid growth (fuzzy memory but I saw numbers that indicated roughly double this) due to the major price cuts of the oculus rift (and also HTC vive to a lesser extent). Adoption appears to be quickly ramping up

For facebook this isn't and never was about VR, it's always been about AR. Zuckerburg has talked about how the problems that have to be solved with VR (head tracking, frame rate etc) are the problems that have to be solved with AR before it can fully take off. Facebook was late on mobile, they aren't going to be late on AR so don't expect them to stop investing in Oculus anytime soon.

Sony's numbers are impressive, I wonder if they could create a VR portable next, i'm sure chips like the Nvidia k1/2 could push VR and also work as a portable and tv console.

Sony did that much with PS VR? It's really unfair. I've been following VR from the beginning.

Oculus made it possible, and it's not working much -> that's unfair

HTC Vive has produced the best headset that made me, and many other, love VR. And they're not dominating the market, and they're not going to, and VR is not becoming this huge thing. It's the future really... I feel like that's unfair.

If you put walls around your garden, don't be surprised when many people don't come in.