Meta-formerly-Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is investing all his energy and efforts in his vision of the Metaverse. So far, the VR-based playground hasn’t been able to collect the right amount of hype.
Palmer Luckey, the founder of Oculus, is one of its major critics. Oculus was previously bought by Facebook for $2 billion back in 2014. He appears to hate how Zuckerberg has changed the use of the platform ever since.
“I don’t think it’s a good product,” he told the audience during The Wall Street Journal’s Tech Live conference on Monday, as quoted by Insider.
“It’s not good, it’s not fun,” Luckey said, referring to Meta’s Horizon Worlds, a crude and reportedly deserted virtual world meant to facilitate social gatherings and business meetings. “Most people on the team would agree it’s not a good product.”
Luckey and Oculus were the basic units in setting the inspiration for Meta’s Quest lineup of VR devices, a key component of the company’s pivot to the metaverse.
“It is terrible today, but it could be amazing in the future,” he said. “I think Mark will put in the money to do that.”
So far, the $15 billion investment in the platform has endangered the funds of investors. Earlier this month, top Facebook consultant John Carmack stated that “there’s a bunch that I’m grumpy about,” criticizing the company’s strategy in selling a VR-based virtual world to the people.
According to internal documents acquired by the Wall Street Journal this month, most Horizon Worlds users failed to return to the company’s flagship metaverse space after just one month of use.
The company’s goal was to obtain half a million active users by the end of 2022, but according to the documents, it is still not up to 200,000.
Therefore, Facebook veterans are taking it public when to criticizing Zuckerberg’s metaverse obsession.
During this week’s conference, Luckey stopped short of predicting a total Meta implosion. Instead, he compared the metaverse to a “project car.”
“You hack at it and maybe no one else sees the value,” Luckey said. “Will they stumble? Yeah sure.”
“Will they waste money? Will they add things to their project car that they later hack off?” he added. “Yes.”
