Remember when Second Life was the next big thing? Pepperidge Farms remembers.
Sure, you can joke around that early stages look like Second Life, but it’s a really lazy way to look at it with absolutely no consideration for what the future holds.
If the pitch was "We make an already popular market segment more user friendly", that's cool. But the pitch is instead "We're making, from the ground up, a new market segment, and it's going to transform the world." followed by a list of things already done to various degrees of quality by dozens of products that already exist and that basically everyone formed an opinion on a decade ago and that at any rate aren't really revolutionary. Pitching stuff like "Universities will make virtual versions of their campus in the Metaverse and people will walk from virtual building to virtual building to take classes" or "The future of stand-up comedy is clapping as a cartoon avatar while you watch a cartoon avatar of a stand-up comedian do comedy in front of you."
If Meta pitched tomorrow that they were going to revolutionize transportation by coming up with a $1,000 self-balancing personal transportation device, I could definitely be convinced that they could spent their way to a better Segway or a better electric skateboard or a better electric skooter or a better wheelchair or a better AirWheel. But if they refused to discuss any of those existing products and their beta looked like a worse Segway and they were promising how the whole world would change because no one would ever use a car or walk up stairs again, I'd be really skeptical.
It's a little bit like Jeffrey Ketzenberg telling me Quibi is going to revolutionize television, while admitting he doesn't watch shortform video content and hasn't looked at any of his failed competitors, but saying "we've fundraised 10x what they have to make this work" and dismissing the widespread negative reaction to the concept and execution as people not daring enough to see his vision.
FB was never a games company. Games are challenging in a distinctly different way compared to the $FB specialty- Platform Scale engineering. Even with Carmack helping them they're still not doing a convincing job of pulling it off to transform themselves into .. whatever they're trying to become. I couldn't even say, perhaps they want to become like MS Xbox or Slony PS5?
Yet VR is just so much harder, no one person alone can really polish to the level needed for mass market adoption. Heck even Doom (1993) era tech still makes a significant part of the population sick.
I've just never been convinced that VR, at the hardware distribution level, will hit a high enough saturation point to become ubiquitous.
AR I still feel will have a better chance at wide scale adoption, however its just my own assesment of the market now and that could change quickly if something hits that is sticky enough to get the user adoption to snowball.