I think the people who care about that game and used the types media channels FB monitored was too small to show up on the company's radar.
But I'm not convinced Zuck was truly all in on VR. I thought the switch to Meta was a hasty attempt to rebrand under fire of a whistleblower / document leak cycle.
Despite all the money spent on VR labs, I always thought the pivot was much more of a Philip-Morris -> Altria thing than Dunkin' Donuts -> Dunkin'.
VR was one dream to achieve that, it’s more difficult to envision that with AI which is why I suspect he was more reluctant to embrace it. AI models are more likely to become a commodity and running inside one of the platforms of the gatekeepers, which is not what Zuck wants.
FWIW, oculus represented a true competitive advantage. And I don’t think it was a coincidence that the Supernatural acquisition was temporarily blocked by the feds.
I think Apple was genuinely worried that fitness was (or still is) a killer use case and threat to Vision Pro.
The delay was enough to make FB lose focus / pivot again into AI.
As for Claude and OpenAI, no one has a revenue net positive business model yet. They are much better than Meta's Llamas, but the model quality doesn't equal cash in the bank. Things might still change in the end. More players are better for me as a consumer.
With the 20/20 hindsight - I'd say the VR bet was too early for Facebook. Instead of trying to build a future tech, they should have acquired it another few years later, only after the tech has reached a more mature stage.
Meta still has a chance to catch up in the AI race given they are not trying to build afresh, but once again adapt by throwing cash at it (which has been the biggest strength of Facebook and Zuckerberg. see: instagram, whatsapp, reels, and many more...)
Eventually we'll get super cheap and light headsets or glasses and gaming will be pretty cool. They should have focused all in on that. It's already a huge industry
That's indeed Meta's strength area.
The real product is the agent harnesses, which to be fair can be trained specifically to work with an in-house harness, but not sure it's necessary to own the models, especially if Chinese companies are licensing theirs for fine-tuning like we see with Cursor.