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Comment by endisneigh | Hacker News Reader

VR is just a gimmick. Even Meta employees working on Horizon Worlds are barely using it to the point where a SVP had to start asking "why not?"

I have 4 quest headsets, and though they are fun to play (especially Beat Saber with Beat Sage), in the end it's just too cumbersome and too much of a commitment.

Price is an issue, but even among people I know who already have one, usage drops steeply after a month or two. Meta themselves pointed this out, noting that even though they have sold 20 million Quests, they only have about 300K active users for Horizon World's and in general they've seen a huge dropoff in engagement across all apps and the Quest itself after a while.

This move is no surprise if you've read their comments on Reality Labs in the last earnings.

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Why are you equating Horizon worlds with vr? It's just one of many use cases, and it's obvious that social vr can only work outside niches after mass adoption was catalyzed by other uses cases.

I am not equating them, Meta considers Horizon their flagship app and so that's what I'm mentioning.

It's their social vr app, but meta knows very well that other uses cases drive vr now. Why do you think they are spending billions on acquiring game studios?

People said the Wii was just a gimmick and that shifted more than a hundred million units with plenty of people playing it regularly.

Contrary to popular belief, there is a big market for consoles that are engaging at the more casual end of gaming.

I don't see how the Wii and the Quest are comparable at all other than the fact that you can play games with them.

That’s a pretty significant “other than” given that the vast majority of Quest 2 sales are for gaming. ;)

Even Meta market the Quest 2 as an entertainment device. (I do appreciate that the Quest Pro is marketed differently, but it’s also barely selling in comparison to other entertainment-orientated VR headsets).

If that's the comparison then we should compare total software sales. It's not even close. The Wii has probably sold near two orders of magnitude more games. We're talking about the Nintendo Wii almost two decades after its release. I highly doubt anyone will be talking about the Quest 2 in 2040.

You’re just making an assumptions now. You might be right but at this stage your point is still just speculation.

Also my point wasn’t that the Quest 2 will be as seminal as the Wii. It was that what people on HN might consider a gimmick with little longevity isn’t always what regular people buying these things think. So it might not be the Quest 2 that lasts. Or it might be numerous different brands of headsets, sharing relatively equal market shares, but you can bet plenty of average consumers are enjoying VR.

> People said the Wii was just a gimmick and that shifted more than a hundred million units

This is several orders of magnitude less than the problem Zuckerberg is facing right now: in order to prop up the stock price, he needs to keep attention of 3 billion users who will otherwise slowly drift away and ruin the main business.

Indeed. But that’s a separate problem to the one the GP raised.

> I have 4 headsets but I really hate VR

never said I hate VR - I said it's cumbersome, which it is.

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