And that’s because Meta did a shitty job to tell people what it is! Have you heard or seen one of their ads? In Germany, they go like „the Metaverse will help doctors to do complicated surgery. It might be virtual, but the Metaverse will have a real impact“
It’s like pure essence of bullshit, on the level of those self-reordering fridges promised in the 90ies. If Meta would just release a single, convincing use case now, maybe things would look different. But they don’t, because they can’t, because there isn’t one. It’s a solution looking for a problem.
I'd like to highlight these parts again. Even as someone who has a desktop gaming pc and all: Base stations suck. Wired VR sucks.
Having wires get in your way while you are in VR is such a shit thing. I would never get back to it, not even for a generational leap in graphics quality.
And base stations automatically mean you need far more space (or "creative solutions"), something people living in e.g. flats don't have. Or don't want to have. Sure, I could probably rearrange half a room around it, but VR is not that great and probably never will be. Almost nothing would be.
Wasn't Facebook losing money on each headset sold, though?
Regardless of how you feel about meta, it’s really impressive that they were able to ship a decent 6DOF, standalone, VR headset at $299 which is relatively easy to use for even normal people.
Going on a tangent, even after all this time people still don’t understand what the metaverse is. The metaverse is simply an AR / VR platform that has online access. That’s it. So this why Fortnite, voxels, and decentraland are NOT part of the metaverse, but Roblox, Minecraft, Rec Room, and Horizon are part because they all have VR support.