At the end of 2021, the company formerly known as Facebook changed its name to Meta in order to be in line with what would be its future great project: the Metaverse. An idea based on the possibility of having a life in a virtual reality world that, although it turned out to be very attractive at the beginning, was gradually deflating, leaving millionaire losses to its investors and even raising the possibility that Mark Zuckerberg would end it someday.
But even though the idea of the Metaverse is still not a good fit, Meta’s virtual reality has quite a future… in video games. Recently, we echoed what will be Meta’s roadmap in virtual reality, and we talked about the future Meta Quest 3 and the future “affordable” model of VR goggles, codenamed “Venture”. These virtual reality glasses are intended to be used mainly with video games.
As Alex Cranz analyzes in The Verge, Meta is currently a very good company in virtual reality and is particularly good at creating game consoles that people want to play on. Beat Saber, SuperHOT, Pistol Whip or even the original Metaverse: VRChat, are good examples of immersive VR games that you can enjoy with Meta’s virtual reality goggles and are very popular among gamers.
And the sales reflect it: according to a report from The Verge, Mark Rabkin, Meta’s vice president of VR, stated that the company has sold more than 20 million Quest glasses to date, including both the first Quest and the second generation of virtual reality glasses: Quest 2. A figure that, while it may seem small, is actually huge, considering that the mass public has not yet adopted virtual reality in a general way.
However, looking at the company’s recent moves, such as announcing at a Meta Connect that they would release virtual reality games from 2 years ago or shutting down the servers of Echo VR, one of the first multiplayer successes their Quests had, makes us doubt that Meta is really aware of the importance it has in the gaming world, with a relevance almost equal to that of Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft with their respective consoles.
Now the question is: will Meta realize its mistake ahead of the launch of the Quest 3 and Venture? Does it already have a commercial strategy ready that includes its virtual reality devices as consoles?
