Facebook Rebrands as ‘Meta’, Oculus Branding to be Phased Out

ok

It was Palmer Luckey though, Facebook just financed the race after Palmer had taken the rocket to space, so their contribution is pretty vacuous isn’t it?

Let me tell you and Silvaring likely what would have happened if Facebook had never got their dirty little mitts into VR and ####ed it for the rest of us. It both would have been for the better, and worse. And I say this as someone who despises what Facebook has done to VR, and I guess generally with their whole mass manipulation thing as well.

VR would never have “died”. Period. Luckey isn’t the singular reason why VR is the way it is today either. Frankly, as much as certain groups would like to deny it, what made (early especially) modern VR the way it was is largely down to Valve. The OG Vive is literally Valve’s then current prototype gussied up for a consumer release. They were the ones dumping Steam cash into VR R&D for years. When Luckey was showing of hacked together prototypes on MTBS3D’s fourms, Valve went right ahead and shared notes on what they were doing. If Valve weren’t, Valve, and basically any other company, they probably would have bought the fledgling Oculus long before Facebook. But instead, Valve wanted the innovation and competition of another entity. Then Facebook being fed up being second banana because they had to exist on other people’s hardware wanted to become like Google on phones / Windows on PC and shoved themselves right in early so they could get to work.
Without Luckey, VR would have still happened, we’d all just be stuck on Valve Time waiting for that to happen.

As for this alternate future, VR as a whole would have likely largely stuck to being a PC accessory first and foremost, with standalone being nothing but a expensive curiosity (Any Standalone HMDs would have to be running x86). Inside-out would have happened eventually, but it likely would have sucked harder for longer (Inside out was seen as a complete joke for a number of years before Facebook released HMD’s with decent inside-out tracking). Oculus would likely still exist, and we’d of had a CV2 and CV3 by now. What they would have looked like, who knows. They’d probably be doing OK for themselves, but would look nothing like they became, to which I mean it wouldn’t have turned into a meaningless brandname front for Facebook before being discarded entirely.
Valve would have still done whatever Valve wanted to do (Remember, infinite Steam money) and released headsets and hardware and such. People would have bought them. People playing Sim games with their simulator rigs would have still loved them. Alyx would have still happened. A decent proportion of VR games on Steam would have still happened. Games made with PSVR in mind would have made their way to PC eventually.
And VRChat and it’s contemporaries would have still existed, with the only difference being there being no VRChat Quest version to cause a hard split in that playerbase. Which while would have lowered raw player numbers, most of that loss would have been Quest kiddies.

What we wouldn’t have is all the content Facebook brought by way of dumping massive amounts of money into it. So none of the later (if any) Oculus exclusive games, 360 stereo video, any of that. Anything high profile Facebook practically single handedly funded wouldn’t have happened. And because no ARM powered standalone HMD with a drive to try and Own The Industry, there wouldn’t be any significant amount of VR software written for ARM. I don’t know what would have become of the XR line of chips from Qualcomm, but they certainly wouldn’t have had the spread through a Facebook product, if existed at all how it did.
Also would mean a handful of studios would still be independent now, making all sorts of games that will now never happen.

High end hardware would still have happened largely how it did, though the very recent push for standalone in HMD’s from other companies (XR2 in a Pimax headset, really?) might not have happened, certainly in the way it did anyway. Hardware prices would trickle down as old hardware became obsolete and the used market became the go-to way to get affordable entry level hardware. Which while that still happened anyway, there wouldn’t be a impossibly cheap standalone headset for many people to point their fingers to instead, especially the used adverse.

Would “VR” have been smaller? Likely. Definitely if it had been Valve largely leading the “Dump infinite cash into R&D” charge instead of Facebook going absolute ham because they’re driven to absolutely dominate to own “””The Metaverse””” or whatever. And it still would have been almost strictly a thing only PC enthusiasts with the hardware to run it would have had a interest in, so no Best Buy displays or whatnot.

I for one would have preferred that future instead of the one we got, but I understand what many other people want from VR lines up more with what Facebook gave them. We straight up wouldn’t have had as many people with headsets, because not everyone wants to get a gaming PC and put forth effort into hardware setup. So smaller and more filled with tech enthusiasts instead of closer to a mass market like it is now. Reading really old RoadtoVR articles would give a good idea of the kind of vibe this would all have.

If anything, Facebook stalled VR and made it head towards a very bleak, disinvestable future, that might kill it during the 2020s. Nobody wants the worst consumer tech company to be in charge of the metaverse, that they don’t have the vision nor talent to develop anyway.

itll more likely be just Quest (version #) with Meta being either implied or just in smaller print somewhere on the device/box