Genuine question - was it the product or the implementation that led this to not pan out? Maybe both?
Not caring about what the user's want is the first problem. The second is that they wanted this done yesterday. So rather than evolving the technology and seeing where the market was going, they tried to build the whole thing at once immediately.
They didn't know what they were building, how to build it, and they threw it together as quickly as possible. The result was, unsurprisingly, pretty lame.
Then to justify the expenditure, they then forced it into every aspect of their Quest devices trying to force adoption. Unsurprisingly again, this failed and also pissed off all their Quest customers and damaged the viability of that platform.
Meta thought they could simply spend their billions and that would be enough to succeed.
This has yet to be determined! Because no VR headset so far has actually been a proper PC. You can't develop on them. You can't just install whatever TF you want. You have to use their app store and getting developer mode enabled doesn't even give you root on the device.
A more accurate statement would be, "No one wants to wear a locked-down, extremely limited-use phone on their faces."
When the Steam Frame comes out, then we'll see how much of a difference having full control over your VR hardware can make. It runs SteamOS and you can install whatever you want. It's a complete Linux distro! An actual PC on your face.
Maybe a game library as large as Steam's will make it a little more appealing, but unlikely. The Quest has a good sized library and seems to have saturated the market.
* Text is the bedrock of basically any content online and text is uniquely difficult to convey in a VR setting without being annoying. It either ends up just floating in space or you have to attach it to objects or you anchor it to a HUD, and a HUD has its own cavalcade of issues in VR around motion sickness. The most successful VR applications, paradoxically, involve the least text they can manage.
* In order to make things accessible to a wide market the applications have to be incredibly simple, to run well on bad hardware, which is uniquely difficult with a 3D space you have to render twice while maintaining high enough FPS to not give people motion sickness
* Most often any CTA in the environment would simply load a web browser, because you couldn't actually... like, buy a product in VR. You were redirected to an amazon listing or shopify website.
* And that's before you get to maintenance. Any intern can update a website. A VR space requires either a dedicated dev budget or accepting whatever janky building tools the platform ships with, which have never once been good enough to build anything actually worth visiting.
* Putting all that aside, there seems to be a substantial slice of humanity who just are not compatible with the tech. I myself enjoy it regularly, I had some issues with motion sickness early on, but toughing it out for awhile got me my "VR legs" as it were and it hasn't been an issue, but I've heard all kinds of things where people's physiology just rejects the headsets.
Overall I think it's just far better as a niche gaming thing and the only reason Facebook and others went so hard into the metaverse was to hopefully recreate the birth of the Internet, and to become landlords of a new digital frontier. And for that, fuck em.
It feels so silly expressing this, but the act of putting on a headset that completely engulfs my vision with screens, even if my space is already clear with a boundary, feels like a much bigger commitment than opening Steam. It doesn't matter if I'm standing for room scale or if I'm already seated with the headset next to me. Both cases feel like extra effort for a lesser experience.
The internet only succeeded because it was so free and open at the beginning, decentralized, open protocols, everything free, no borders, no censorship, no surveillance just hackers that layed the foundation with no restrictions placed upon them (except the severe technical limitations of the time for them to overcome). Of course that's almost all gone now with capitalism taking over turning everything to shit, but that came only after it already was successful.
Meta's vision and implementation of the metaverse was exactly the opposite end of the spectrum in every way from the start: centralized, commercial, proprietary, censored, surveilled, restricted, closed, walls everywhere, safe, advertiser friendly, it was uncool, not fun and no style. Like they paid people to create shitty "worlds" and force their employees to use it, otherwise nobody touched that shitshow willingly, except (concerningly) for some random toddlers for some reason.
You can never opt out of reality, so that dramatically reduces the value of a metaverse, and people don't ever actually want pretend reality.
If you are willing to relax the parameters to eliminate the full VR immersion and "rich presence" and other superficial nonsense that moron Execs want because they have no imagination and just think making Ready Player One will make them rich, then we've had the "Metaverse" since the 90s. It's the internet.
In terms of a digital space with user generated content, there have been tons. Some even successful. Meta had ample knowledge to draw from in the space, and should have been able to truly stand on the shoulders of giants.
Instead they chose to omit legs from their atrocious avatars and not give anyone any reason to use it over existing services.
Zuck is a moron that can't accept "You are a moron" as an answer.
Just see what Facebook did to BeatSabre and other VR games and Game studios they acquired.
Sure, they could have cloned it, but better with more money - that would be less questionable, especially if it actually worked out.
Well, at least they helped to provide affordable headsets for VRChat players at the right time. :)