From my experience playing social VR, I think Facebook Meta has it all wrong. If you go around VRChat communities you'll find an overwhelming amount of anime girls and furries make up the user base and creator base. In VR, your avatar isn't just a little picture next to your name, it's your body and your identity. Some people will pay hundreds or thousands for an artist to make a custom and unique avatar for them, or they'll spend hundreds of hours learning and making stuff themselves. Some people like to be a robot, a hologram, a pooltoy, some people like to have four arms or be a centaur, there's different styles and body proportions, practically anything is possible and creativity is the only limit. There is a whole economy of avatar asset creators on sites like booth and gumroad, and there are artists who make a livelihood off of doing 3D avatar commissions.<p>Facebook Meta is basically trying to throw all of this away and pretend none of it exists, and force people into one-size-fits-all humanoid avatars that people can customize slightly with some sliders and options. In fact they weren't even sure they could trust people to have legs. It effectively simulates the real-life feeling of having body dysphoria and not being able to change your body. It's virtual reality for christ's sake! There's no physical reason why somebody couldn't be a Blender default cube if they wished...<p>Facebook Meta is trying to make a sterile platform safe for business meetings and advertisers, while simultaneously trying to attract users and creators so that it's not a ghost town and has actual things to do, while still trying to retain a monopoly on avatar customization so that they can eventually earn massive wealth by selling virtual clothing for $10. The result seems to be a massive waste of money that ends up catering to nobody (except to Zuckerberg?). It feels a bit like if they made a computer in the early days of computing that didn't support programming, just because they hope if this nifty "computing" idea ever takes off they'll have a monopoly on programming
> Almost as astonishingly, revenues at the division have actually fallen from the 2021 high of $2.3bn, to $2.1bn in 2024...<p>Not sure why this is astonishing. It was new back in 2021. People tried, mostly hated it, and moved on. Honestly, I'd consider the $200mn drop a victory.