Meta advisor John Carmack — the digital pioneer behind the blockbuster videogame “Doom” — isn’t impressed with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s vision for the “metaverse.”
“There’s a bunch that I’m grumpy about,” he said during “Carmack Unscripted” — a dedicated hour featured at Facebook-turned-Meta’s Connect 2022 conference earlier this week.
The consultant made the comments a few hours after the release of Zuckerberg’s self-lauding keynote presentation, in which the founder showed off the company’s latest developments in the virtual reality space.
But while Zuckerberg used his presentation to flaunt Meta’s so-called successes, Carmack took his own hour to tear the company’s metaverse strategy to absolute shreds.
“Last year I said that I’d be disappointed if we weren’t having Connect in Horizon this year,” said a legless, pixelated Carmack, standing in a digital Horizon Worlds house.
“This here, this isn’t really what I meant,” he added. “Me being an avatar on-screen on a video for you is basically the same thing as [just] being on a video.”
Quest Qualms
In his “unscripted” speech, Carmack voiced his frustrations with the newly-unveiled Quest Pro headset. While it may feature some technological improvements over Meta’s Quest 2, which was released exactly two years ago, the battery life is atrocious, and it’s wildly expensive.
The “Doom” creator clearly isn’t a fan. “I’ve always been clear that I’m all about the cost-effective mass-market headsets being the most important thing for us and for the adoption of VR,” Carmack said during the event. “And Quest Pro is definitely not that…”
Doomed Strategy
Carmack took aim at Meta’s overall strategy as well. He acknowledged Zuckerberg is caught up in an uphill battle, clearly struggling with the technological limitations of contemporary VR technologies.
But he also argued that Meta is currently too focused on and “paranoid” about the quality of its Horizon Worlds spaces and avatars, and should instead try to get as many people into those spaces as possible — a problem that a $1,499.99 VR headset isn’t exactly going to solve.
