Well, I told you so—been saying this consistently for half a decade.

Meta can’t succeed with VR. I’m not even sure they can succeed with the metaverse. If today’s rumours of 30% cuts to the project are accurate—$4–6B in annual spend gone from Reality Labs—things aren’t looking good.

And before anyone jumps in with the usual chorus of “But Quest sold millions,” please. Yes, Meta has shipped north of 20M Quest headsets across the line, and Quest 2 on its own has cleared 20M units, giving Meta something like 70–80% of the entire VR hardware market. That sounds huge until you zoom out and realize the whole AR/VR market shipped only about 8.1M headsets in 2023 and actually shrank by 8.3% year over year.

So yes, “millions sold” is technically true. So were 3D TVs. Between 2010 and 2013, manufacturers shipped roughly 115M 3D TVs worldwide—2.26M in 2010, 24.14M in 2011, 41.45M in 2012, and 44.97M in 2013—before interest collapsed and production quietly ended by 2016. Lots of units moved, lots of corporate optimism, and then everyone collectively realized that wearing glasses on the couch was not the future of television.

Quest is exactly that kind of success. It proved there is a real niche, generated over $1B in store revenue early on, and became the default headset in a tiny market. What it did not do is justify a $10–16B per year bonfire. Reality Labs has now burned through more than $70B since 2020, and Wall Street just rewarded Meta with roughly $69B in extra market cap for threatening to shut off part of the hose.

Today alone, Meta’s stock is up 3.43%. That is not what “strategic victory” looks like. That is the market paying you to admit it was a mistake.

This was always baked into the plan. Meta has never been a gaming company. Never was. Never will be. Their core competency is running a 3B+ user social graph and monetizing it with targeted ads. Gaming lives somewhere completely different in the stack. It is what happens when you combine decades of studio culture, a back catalog of hits, and a player base that will absolutely roast you if you ship mediocrity.

Meta walked into that arena with Horizon Worlds and a productivity pitch. Of course it was uphill.

And here’s the thing few want to admit: you can’t skip gaming as the validation layer. Every transformative computing platform had to go through gamers first.

Home computing rode on consoles. Even before the Apple II or Commodore 64 took off, Pong home consoles had already sold in the millions and proved that families would put a computer in the living room. By the time later systems like the NES arrived and moved 60M+ units, the pattern was already set.

Portable computing rode on Game Boys. The Game Boy and Game Boy Color together sold about 118.7M units worldwide, which is more than the entire current global installed base of VR headsets by a wide margin. Handheld gaming proved “computer in your pocket” as a lifestyle before phones ever got there.

Even AI had to ride shotgun with gaming first. Nvidia started as a GPU vendor chasing better framerates and prettier lighting for PC games. Now it controls roughly 90%+ of the discrete GPU market and is the first company to blow past $4T in market cap on the back of data center and AI demand. The entire modern AI boom is running on an architecture originally funded by people who wanted Quake and Half-Life to run faster.

This is not a metaphor. It is a pattern. Gaming is where new hardware justifies its existence. Everything else follows. If you try to skip that and go straight to “corporate metaverse for meetings and branded worlds,” the market will eventually hand you a $70B invoice.

So is VR dead? No. Not remotely.

What is dying is the idea that VR becomes “the next internet” because one company rebrands itself and spends at metaverse-as-a-service scale.

Meanwhile, Valve has officially announced the Steam Frame—a streaming-first standalone headset running SteamOS, launching in early 2026, and built explicitly to run your existing Steam library in VR or flat mode. It is specced like a proper gaming device and designed by people who are obviously VR users themselves.

In other words, VR is not going away. It is just leaving the hype decks and returning to the only people who have consistently turned weird new hardware into actual platforms that matter—gamers, and the companies that know how to build for them.

Meta is reportedly going to slash spending on the metaverse

Meta is reportedly planning deep budget cuts to the metaverse team. Layoffs could start as early as January.

Engadget (www.engadget.com)

@atomicpoet Not to mention that nearly half their market (women gamers) are actively harmed by the product. They give us migraines. 3D TV does the same thing. Market exclusion is never a winning strategy.

Well, I told you so—been saying this consistently for half a decade.

Meta can’t succeed with VR. I’m not even sure they can succeed with the metaverse. If today’s rumours of 30% cuts to the project are accurate—$4–6B in annual spend gone from Reality Labs—things aren’t looking good.

And before anyone jumps in with the usual chorus of “But Quest sold millions,” please. Yes, Meta has shipped north of 20M Quest headsets across the line, and Quest 2 on its own has cleared 20M units, giving Meta something like 70–80% of the entire VR hardware market. That sounds huge until you zoom out and realize the whole AR/VR market shipped only about 8.1M headsets in 2023 and actually shrank by 8.3% year over year.

So yes, “millions sold” is technically true. So were 3D TVs. Between 2010 and 2013, manufacturers shipped roughly 115M 3D TVs worldwide—2.26M in 2010, 24.14M in 2011, 41.45M in 2012, and 44.97M in 2013—before interest collapsed and production quietly ended by 2016. Lots of units moved, lots of corporate optimism, and then everyone collectively realized that wearing glasses on the couch was not the future of television.

Quest is exactly that kind of success. It proved there is a real niche, generated over $1B in store revenue early on, and became the default headset in a tiny market. What it did not do is justify a $10–16B per year bonfire. Reality Labs has now burned through more than $70B since 2020, and Wall Street just rewarded Meta with roughly $69B in extra market cap for threatening to shut off part of the hose.

Today alone, Meta’s stock is up 3.43%. That is not what “strategic victory” looks like. That is the market paying you to admit it was a mistake.

This was always baked into the plan. Meta has never been a gaming company. Never was. Never will be. Their core competency is running a 3B+ user social graph and monetizing it with targeted ads. Gaming lives somewhere completely different in the stack. It is what happens when you combine decades of studio culture, a back catalog of hits, and a player base that will absolutely roast you if you ship mediocrity.

Meta walked into that arena with Horizon Worlds and a productivity pitch. Of course it was uphill.

And here’s the thing few want to admit: you can’t skip gaming as the validation layer. Every transformative computing platform had to go through gamers first.

Home computing rode on consoles. Even before the Apple II or Commodore 64 took off, Pong home consoles had already sold in the millions and proved that families would put a computer in the living room. By the time later systems like the NES arrived and moved 60M+ units, the pattern was already set.

Portable computing rode on Game Boys. The Game Boy and Game Boy Color together sold about 118.7M units worldwide, which is more than the entire current global installed base of VR headsets by a wide margin. Handheld gaming proved “computer in your pocket” as a lifestyle before phones ever got there.

Even AI had to ride shotgun with gaming first. Nvidia started as a GPU vendor chasing better framerates and prettier lighting for PC games. Now it controls roughly 90%+ of the discrete GPU market and is the first company to blow past $4T in market cap on the back of data center and AI demand. The entire modern AI boom is running on an architecture originally funded by people who wanted Quake and Half-Life to run faster.

This is not a metaphor. It is a pattern. Gaming is where new hardware justifies its existence. Everything else follows. If you try to skip that and go straight to “corporate metaverse for meetings and branded worlds,” the market will eventually hand you a $70B invoice.

So is VR dead? No. Not remotely.

What is dying is the idea that VR becomes “the next internet” because one company rebrands itself and spends at metaverse-as-a-service scale.

Meanwhile, Valve has officially announced the Steam Frame—a streaming-first standalone headset running SteamOS, launching in early 2026, and built explicitly to run your existing Steam library in VR or flat mode. It is specced like a proper gaming device and designed by people who are obviously VR users themselves.

In other words, VR is not going away. It is just leaving the hype decks and returning to the only people who have consistently turned weird new hardware into actual platforms that matter—gamers, and the companies that know how to build for them.

Meta is reportedly going to slash spending on the metaverse

Meta is reportedly planning deep budget cuts to the metaverse team. Layoffs could start as early as January.

Engadget (www.engadget.com)

@atomicpoet
I would argue that smartphones didn't go through a gaming phase.

So... if someone were to build an AR/VR headset that is in the same price range as a TV, comfortable to wear, not straining to the eyes, usable as a first or second laptop/PC screen, that might sell a lot more.

Otherwise, the setup costs alone (load headset, check batteries, clear space, likely connect desktop PC...) make it less likely that someone will prefer it to... a monitor that already sits on the desk.

TheJen will not comply Didn’t know the detail about migraines. My wife seems to like VR. But what’s the data on how VR gives women migraines?

@atomicpoet Awesome. Search sucks so hard now I cannot find the study again. Dammit. Sorry. I did have facts to back it up, but...

@TheJen @atomicpoet You're probably thinking of a study like https://www.news.iastate.edu/news/cybersickness-more-likely-affect-women-ongoing-research-understand-why .