Le Journal

You got a lot of your history mixed up here. Nvidia was founded in 1993 by former AMD, SUN and IBM engineers, eight years after Microsoft Window 1.0 released. Microsoft was a big player in spreadsheets with Multiplan on DOS, but were asked by Apple to create a new one using the mouse driven GUI of their still in development Mac that debuted in 1984. This was Excel, and Microsoft created Windows to also run it on PCs, with Window 1.0 pretty much just being an Excel launcher. Microsoft pushed for GUIs requiring graphic cards very early on, long before the first 3D accelerated cards were released. And Gabe Newell was convinced to drop out of Harvard by Steve Balmer while he was visiting his brother at Microsoft. He spent 13 years as a programmer and executive there, and was the producer for the first three versions of Windows. His move to leave Microsoft and start Valve was first inspired by the release of the original Doom in 1993, still a DOS application because Windows wasn't optimized for games, and at one time estimated to have been installed on more computers than Windows itself, with Newell offering to port Doom to Windows for free. And then by John Carmack plus a friend, who had gone from Microsoft to id Software to work on Quake directly (Newell: "one of Carmack's programming heroes"), telling him and Mike Harrington (also working for Microsoft) "'Hey, you guys should stop working at Microsoft and start a games company". Which they did, flying down to id Software in Texas in 1996, bouncing around ideas with them, according to Newell ending in Carmack saying "'Great, here's the source code to Quake, go build a game". Which was the beginning of Half-Life, and the rest is legend. Valve didn't come from some indie game resistance fighers keeping up PC gaming against the mainstream declaring it dead, but from a couple of already wealthy Microsoft managers with the help of the back then most successful PC gaming development studio. And while their fame is for introducing a narrative shooter and tons of game mechanics that basically shook up the whole gaming world the very moment the Half-Life demo released, the real key to Valve's success is the introduction of digital distribution, cutting out the middle men like Walmart and other large stores that had a lot of control over video game publishing through their shelf space, and took a very large cut from every game sold.

The cuts mainly affect teams working on VR headsets, VR-based social networks such as Horizon Worlds, and VR game studios. I don't know what there is to misinterpret here. What Lucky is doing is sugarcoating the situation. I agree 100% with Scott Hayden's comparison with Nintendo or Sony.

In VR, it would go very well with my Steam Deckard Headset (No I will not refer to it by its lame name)

Well, he should adopt Praydog's donation methodology then, only then his mod wouldn't have to be taken down.

TL;DR: they are not getting out of VR, they are getting out of VR game creation and publishing. I agree with Luckey that the doomer narrative of Meta abandoning VR is “obviously false", but it is too easy to say that "10% layoffs is basically six months of normal churn concentrated into 60 days". Technically this is true, and Meta has been through much larger layoffs, but what is special here is that this is only one of several concurrent events hinting at Meta reducing their VR engagement. They not only fired a lot of people working on VR HMDs and Horizon Worlds, they also closed three of their gaming studios, killed several contracts with 3rd party studios for unreleased games, ended their program to support VR game developers financially, and finally killed their Quest for business program. So this is a lot more than just regular churn, this is a strategic move that they effectively announced before. Almost exactly a year ago a memo from Meta's CTO Andrew Bosworth leaked saying that 2025 would be the most critical for VR:This year likely determines whether this entire effort will go down as the work of visionaries or a legendary misadventure.Interestingly he particularly pointed to Horizon Wolds on mobile, not even on Quest:.And Horizon Worlds on mobile absolutely has to break out for our long term plans to have a chance.Even though most VR enthusiasts despise Horizon Worlds, it was their attempt to counter existing large virtual communities like Fortnite and Roblox that have been venturing out of their pure gaming focus, and turned themselves into large venues that draw millions of players/users/avatars in concerts etc., and come with very lucrative in-world economies, exactly what Meta was aiming for with their Metaverse. All the current cuts hint that their internal growth targets for Horizon World (on phones and in VR) clearly weren't met, and their evaluation of the whole VR venture turned more towards "legendary misadventure". But all this is about (multi-user) virtual worlds, basically the metaverse part, not XR as a whole. They are pretty much getting out of either creating or paying for any gaming content for HMDs, but that's not the same as dropping VR/XR. They will very likely push future HMDs more towards media devices like AVP and GXR at higher prices, with the long term of merging them into smartgasses. They will still support game developers, just not financially, and the vast majority of apps on the Horizon store will be games for a long time. But you may have to pay extra for controllers on Quest 4.