Video game industry legend John Carmack, the man who brought us Doom, Quake and Wolfenstein, is done with Facebook’s virtual reality ‘metaverse’ project, which is apparently a complete mess.
The 52-year-old Carmack, who joined Meta from Oculus after its $2 billion acquisition in 2014, said in an internal memo published in part by the NY Times, that he’s “wearied of the fight” and would focus on his own startup – AI firm Keen Technologies, for which he’s raised $20 million.
“It has been a struggle for me,” Carmack wrote in the post. “I have a voice at the highest levels here, so it feels like I should be able to move things, but I’m evidently not persuasive enough.”
When Facebook bought virtual reality company Oculus in 2014, Carmack was one of the most influential voices in the VR world. He decided to stay with the company after CEO Mark Zuckerberg chose to pivot the company’s focus – and name – towards the metaverse.
Yet even though Meta was moving swiftly into an area that Mr. Carmack specialized in, he was sometimes a dissenting voice about how the effort was going. He became known for internal posts that criticized the decision-making and direction set forth by Mr. Zuckerberg and Andrew Bosworth, Meta’s chief technology officer. Mr. Carmack had been working part-time for the company in recent years. -NYT
In an August podcast interview, Carmack said Meta’s $10 billion in losses within the company’s augmented reality and VR division made him “sick to my stomach,” and that the company’s metaverse efforts have been bogged down by concerns over diversity and privacy.
Carmack has also internally criticized features of the company’s Quest VR headsets – saying that the hardware of the Quest 2 headset was “exactly what I wanted to see from the beginning,” but that the software was lacking.
“We built something pretty close to The Right Thing,” he said.
Still, Carmack thinks that Meta has the best shot at pulling off VR.
“V.R. can bring value to most of the people in the world, and no company is better positioned to do it than Meta,” he wrote in his farewell post.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 12/17/2022 – 14:00
