A hard blow (and there are already a few) for Meta, but not an unexpected surprise, the departure of John Carmack from the company, which was made public a few hours ago. And I say that it is not surprising because just two months ago, he was already somewhat disappointed both with the Metaverse ecosystem in general, and with the advances in it carried out by Meta in particular. And, what is worse, there were also certain important divergences regarding how the company’s strategy should evolve.
As we already told you, one of the points defended by John Carmack, and in which I think the vast majority of us will agree, is that in order to popularize the Metaverse it is essential that access to 3D technology be much cheaper than it would be. it is today. Meta’s proposed entry point for this purpose is Meta Quest 2, which is priced at €450, and Carmack was advocating the need to be able to bring an entry-level VR headset to market for a base price of €250. dollars, an amount that would undoubtedly bring him closer to many more pockets. Meta, however, decided to go high, with the presentation of Meta Quest Pro worth 1,700 euros.
There have also been disagreements regarding the avatars. Meta aims to offer more realistic avatars (and who knew, looking at the current result…), while John Carmack took a very different position: to generate large numbers of computationally cheap avatars using affordable hardware. At this point it is more difficult to take sides for one position or the other, since both are defensible based on different criteria, but it is clear that Carmack did not feel comfortable seeing how his criteria was in the background.
Thus, according to what we can read in Yahoo! Finance, John Carmack has decided to end his relationship with Meta by resigning from his current positionafter a first step in this direction a little over three years ago, when he resigned as CTO of Oculus in 2019. At that time the Metaverse was still in the pipeline, but at that time we already accused a certain wear and tear on the father of some of the most important games in history, such as Quake and Doom, although at the time the boredom seemed to be mainly due to the lack of evolution and growth of the virtual reality market.
Now, as he leaves Meta, John Carmack once again expresses his frustration, as he did a couple of months ago, stating that despite his role in the company, his opinion has not served to stop some movements that in his opinion were wrong. “I have a voice at the highest levels here, so I feel like I should be able to move things around.”, there would be John Carmack in an internal note to which the medium has had access, “but i’ve never been able to stop stupid things before they do damage, or set a direction and make a team really stick to it”.
The loss of John Carmack comes at a critical time for the Metaverse, or, more accurately, for Meta’s wager on it. With accounts that do not come out, users that do not arrive, developments that take forever, shareholders that despair and massive layoffs to cut losses, that one of the most visible and recognizable faces of your initiative leaves frustrated only serves to encourage the perception of that we are facing a ship that is going nowhere.
