VR pioneer and gaming veteran John Carmack is stepping down as senior consultant for Meta’s virtual reality practice. His criticism: the company’s lack of efficiency and the resulting sabotage of its own projects. Meta has a plethora of staff and resources, but according to Carmack, you’re constantly self-sabotaging and wasting your powers. The company works just half as efficiently as he would like.
Carmack offended: Inefficiency like an underutilized GPU
In a pointed formulation, Carmack even writes that the company has only known inefficiency so far and is therefore not prepared for the inevitable competition and the associated “tightening of the belt”. For him, it is as if the production of the VR products runs like a GPU that is only 5 percent loaded, and that hurts and offends him personally. He defused this comparison with an addition: He has worked hard on system optimization all his life, which is why inefficiency hurts him; the comparison between a system load and an organization may have been exaggerated.
Carmack had written to the Meta staff in an internal circular; the text was leaked to the press, whereupon Business Insiders first and thereafter the New York Times reported on it and quoted from it. Because he found the descriptions there incomplete, he published them himself the full text on his Facebook account.
Disagreement with Metaverse and expensive VR headset
It was a struggle for him, he writes there. Although he was heard in the highest circles of the VR company Oculus, he couldn’t move things in his own way and probably didn’t appear convincingly enough. After all, it was his own fault that he was not the driving force, because after Meta took over Oculus, he did not move to its headquarters to influence the managers there. He suspects he would have been bad at it anyway, and preferred to do the programming.
Carmack is one of the co-founders of the games company id Software (e.g. with the legendary game series “Doom” and “Quake”). He left the company in 2013 and switched to the VR glasses manufacturer Oculus, where he worked as Chief Technology Officer (CTO) until 2019 and gained a reputation as a luminary in the VR scene. However, he remained connected to Oculus in an advisory capacity. Back in 2014, the then-Facebook meta-group bought Oculus. Carmack commented critically on the developments under the direction of the Meta group, such as the Metaverse, which he believes was created out of the ground.
And a rift was already indicated when he criticized the VR glasses Meta Quest Pro for their high price in October of this year (1500 US dollars, to buy in Europe for 1800 euros). He recommended that Meta instead produce budget VR headsets for a mass market. In his farewell text, Carmack writes that in future he will devote himself to his start-up company and use it to promote the topic of VR. He continues to believe that VR glasses can benefit everyone – and he still thinks Meta is the most suitable company for this.
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