> Citing COVID-19, CEO Rony Abovitz wrote in a blog post that the company needed to shift focus
Right... because of Covid-19. As a counter example, Animal Crossing on the Nintendo Switch is doing phenomenal right now, in part due to Covid-19.
Right... because of Covid-19. As a counter example, Animal Crossing on the Nintendo Switch is doing phenomenal right now, in part due to Covid-19.
I get the sense that "shifting focus" means that Magic Leap were so focused on the hardware that they didn't really think concretely about bringing a viable platform to market, or something like that. I just don't understand how a company raises that kind of money and gets totally exposed during a financial crisis like this. Did they really raise that much money without a concrete go-to-market strategy?
> Did they really raise that much money without a concrete go-to-market strategy?
I'm sure they had a nominal strategy. But if you take the anthropologist-from-Mars perspective on Magic Leap, it looks like their real business was selling feelings of excitement to investors.
This is a common phenomenon with build-it-and-they-will-come businesses. If you want to crate a good business, you need contact with reality early and often. You need to test your hypotheses on actual customers, because that's how you really learn to maximize delivered value.
If you want gobs of investor money, on the other hand, it's often better to have no proof at all. With $0 in revenue, investors just have to imagine the billions that await. But once you have $1 in revenue, suddenly projections get anchored to real data. Rather than reveling in dreams of what people might do with, say, Segway or Google Glass, people insist on looking at the dreary reality.
Do you think the Wii was their first console or something?
Animal crossing is software, so not a fair comparison.
They do not have any real games to play that the public at large would find fun for more than an hour or so. Their apps are like PoCs for what you can do with Magic Leap. If FF7R was on Magic Leap, I bet they'd be selling a lot more units and it'd be a great time for them.
Instead, you're better off getting the Oculus or Valves VR where you have tons of actual games to play and support for streaming apps.
There is no way for Magic Leap to capitalize on the consumer purchasing right now, because they don't have a catalog that supports the hardware to any meaningful degree. And they can't suddenly churn those things out in the space of a month since we've been hit with quarantine.