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Comment by SrslyJosh | Hacker News Reader

He spent $15 billion to make a shitty ghost of a Second Life clone. That's not innovation.

I don't know if you're being facetious or what, but of the 15B spent on Reality labs obviously only a fraction went to Horizon Worlds.

Yes but Horizon Worlds is literally the "metaverse" that they named the whole company after. That's the flagship product it's all for. It's not some accessory app, it's the main thing.

Yikes.

Metaverse != Horizon Worlds

Can you explain what the Metaverse is then?

It's supposed to be the platform for VR(i.e iOS sdk with appstore and all the lock-in).

So he bet the company on a third party app store that lets you download the shitty Second Life wannabe that nobody plays. How is that any better? Lol

Not really. The Second Life wanna be app is a bonus if it becomes popular. Just like Safari and other Apple apps on iOS. Meta bet it's VR ecosystem will become the next iPhone/ios ecosystem(hardware and software). So if someone builds a "killer" app on Oculus Meta wins anyway.

But that platform is Horizon Worlds.

Mark's metaverse is very specifically a shared virtual physical environment. Yes you're going to pay to enter spaces and have experiences and buy clothing... but Horizon Worlds isn't an app on the platform. It is the platform, it is the metaverse, everything is happening within it in Mark's vision here.

Metaverse == Horizon Worlds

Horizon Worlds is quite literally an app on the platform.

Yes, an app on a platform that isn't the metaverse.

The Quest operating system, and the Meta app store, are obviously not the metaverse... the metaverse is a universe of shared 3D spaces. That's Horizon Worlds. The spaces are the "worlds".

I don't know man, this all sounds very rambling and circuitous. I was replying to your comment saying "but Horizon Worlds isn't an app on the platform" which is blatantly wrong.

I think Second Life is only a pancake game? Oculus hardware is VR- if you haven't tried it out, it's really impressive how immersive it can be

It's so impressive most people who try it out put it away after a week and never touch it again. Who the heck wants this stuff?

If you have a Quest 2 you're not using, feel free to send it my way!

I don't. Tried it at a friend's house and was like... that's nice but I'd never want to deal with the hassle and low quality games.

Yes -- except you only have 2 hours of gameplay with AirLink

Seriously, where is the real product for that money? How did they spend that much?

I can definitely see how you can spend lots of resources building a new platform. I could spend years developing/interating over a "simple" cms. Big projects such VR are hard to get right. It's both a hardware and software problem and Zuck's timming may not work in his favor(he may be too early on VR)

Some comments have mentioned that the money went into company acquisitions. I don't have a source for that.

That's larger than the entire NSF annual budget.

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