Meta staff's confidence in Metaverse and Zuckerberg explaining it drops sharply

I bought a Quest 2 over the holidays to see what the state of the technology is. Usually I am more at the bleeding edge with all tech but this genre never really seemed interesting until recently.

I am impressed, the technology is developed far enough that you can lose yourself into the virtual worlds. But that is also a problem, as I'd rather not "lose myself" by disconnecting from reality too often.

The experience isn't casual enough because you need to make time and physical space and then check out of your first reality.

There is a popular game called BeatSaber which is an innovative demonstration of what VR can do and a way to burn time, but it's by no means a killer app that warrants the start up expense.

More interesting from a utility perspective is app called VRChat that puts you inside a virtual house, or lounge, or a club or something and you can talk to other people's avatars as if you are sharing the same room. This could be really interesting for long term relationships and socializing (for example, to play chess together), but I can see why nobody would fire this up when you could zoom call.

I have doubts as well that this tech can ever be more than a medium sized niche.

Here is my explainer.

Take things we already do in 2D and make them 3D. The 3D world will marginally increase the utility of what we do but will greatly increase the cost. The equipment will be expensive and the cost of making content will increase substantially. A fairly large percentage of our users will become nauseous using the device but that is ok - we can sell drugs like Zofran to help with the nausea. The equipment will not be portable so users will not be able to carry it with them for use when they are bored which is our primary use case currently. That is ok because at some point they will spend all their time in Metaversa being nauseous - being nauseous will seem normal and not being nauseous in the Real will seem weird. At this point our users cease to contributors to the gene pool.

Once we realize this isn't going to work we double pivot back to Facebook Classic. We claim our users are demanding the Old Facebook and won't settle for anything less. Users will be so relieved that we have gone back to simply selling their data instead of making them ill they will gladly except any Eula we give them. Kaaaa..ching