Rui Carmo
The Business Insider article (archive) has a bit more… “journalism”, but Carmack’s memo makes for much better reading and echoes what I’ve heard from other people at Meta: the politics, whimsical strategizing and “hedonistic optimism”, together with the lack of focus and QA, have been a constant challenge in improving the product and (what’s worse) also the developer experience and even sales.
This, in turn, has been cascading over into the business itself, and the recent Quest 2 price hike was due to the lack of sustained revenue from sales fees in the Quest store.
Which essentially means people aren’t buying that many apps (or games) for it either–which gives me pause as to whether their ecosystem is even sustainable at the old hardware price points, let alone at the exorbitant pricing for the Quest Pro.
I’ve always been amazed that John would put up with things for this long, and am quite interested in seeing what he gets up to next in artificial general intelligence.
As to the metaverse, well… We’ll see.