meta connect Archives

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg gave insight into the company’s current and future hardware business model at Connect 2021, indicating that the plan is to continue to sell devices at cost or with subsidies to help build a larger ecosystem with as many users as possible.

The Quest 2 starts at just $299 despite having a higher resolution, more features, and less weight than its predecessor. That entry level price, however, may just be the start for Meta’s long-term ambitions.

Back in March, Zuckerberg confirmed that the company’s business model for headsets was focused on offering a low price above everything else.

Last week at Connect 2021, Zuckerberg gave further details about Meta’s commitment to this model, now and going forward. You can read a transcription below or watch from the 43:15 mark on the video embedded above.

Most of all, I’ve come to believe that the lack of choice and high fees are stifling innovation, stopping people from building new things and holding back the entire internet economy. We’ve tried to take a different approach. We want to serve as many people as possible, which means working to make our services cost less. not more.

Our mobile apps are free. Our ads’ business model is an auction, which guarantees every business the most competitive price possible. We offer our creator and commerce tools either at cost or with modest fees to enable as much creation and commerce as possible.

And it’s worked. Billions of people love our products. We have hundreds of millions of businesses on our platform, and we have a rapidly growing ecosystem and a thriving business.

That’s the approach that we want to take to help build the metaverse too. We plan to continue to either subsidize our devices or sell them at cost to make them available to more people. We’ll continue supporting sideloading and linking to PCs, so consumers and developers have choice rather than forcing them to use the Quest Store to find apps or reach customers. And we’ll aim to offer developer and creator services with low fees in as many cases as possible. So we can maximize the overall creator economy, while recognizing that to keep investing in this future we’ll need to keep some fees higher for some period to make sure that we don’t lose too much money on this program overall.

After all, while a growing number of developers are already profitable, we expect to invest many billions of dollars for years to come before the metaverse reaches scale. Our hope though is that if we all work at it then within the next decade, the metaverse will reach a billion people, host hundreds of billions of dollars of digital commerce and support jobs for millions of creators.

John Carmack wants the next iteration of Meta’s Connect event to happen in VR via the new Horizon apps.

Carmack said as much in his keynote speech during this year’s event. During the session, he recalled past in-person events in which attendees would come and ask him questions in hallways, or even when he did the same inside VR last year.

“Really what we want to have is something like that session that’s like the real Connect where thousands of people are milling around, some of them cluster around me outside and we all crowd into a room for the big keynotes,” Carmack said. “And you get all of that ability without having to have people fly across the country or across the world to get there. That’s what we’ve always been pitching as the value of VR.”

“So I really do want us to pitch Connect as the north star event of what we’re doing. We’ve got an event that we do every year here, we’ve got a user base for this. We should be doing this in the metaverse. If we can’t hande this, we can’t handle the vision. And we could do this by next year. I thought we could have done it by this year if we really made this a frontline focus. But we didn’t have that focus like we do now a year ago.”

Carmack continued saying he’d be “really disappointed” if this wasn’t a reality in time for next year’s Connect. “I want to be walking around the halls or walking around the stage as my avatar in front of thousands of people getting in the feed across multiple platforms,” he said. “I’m laying that guantlet down right now, we should be able to do that. This should be exactly in line with what our stated mission is.”

The problem, as Carmack goes on to mention, is that the current Quest hardware struggles to handle even Horizon’s current 16-person limit, with character fidelity degrading in crowds. “The magic being reached for by many people is that, well, cloud rendering would let us use much more powerful systems than the current headset systems and we could add a bunch more on there.”

Carmack said he was supportive of the idea, but noted that would be a lot of cost in terms of people not having the internet connection to attend, and that Meta could also explore ideas like hybrid applications.

We’d definitely love to see Connect in VR next year – would you want to attend that way?

Zuckerberg: Meta Will Continue To Subsidize Headset Cost

John Carmack Wants The Next Connect To Be In VR Via Horizon