Jaeden Schafer

Meta definitely quickly captured the majority of the VR headset

maker market with Oculus and then the Quest device.

The sales then steadily kind of went down.

Counterpoint Research reported that global VR headset shipments fell 12% year over year in 2024, making the third consecutive annual decline.

Meta had about 77% of those shipments.

But I mean, they obviously had a product interesting enough that they scammed Apple into getting into the market and building their own VR headset.

And

And Apple's headset also was a huge flop and didn't see very much demand or usage.

Or, I mean, honestly, someday that Apple VR headset is going to be like a collector's item, in my opinion.

But I don't think that this is completely ruling out the entire industry.

And I do think that there's some interesting plays here.

I think Meta's long-term interest was never just hardware.

They were a lot more focused on the economics of running their own platform, whether that was apps or games.

And they're kind of looking at this as a way to escape from Apple and Google's grip on mobile app distribution.

That was, I think, why they're putting so much money and really trying for this whole thing.

During Facebook Connect back in 2021, Zuckerberg was openly criticizing the Apple-Google duopoly.

He said that building under the rules had been really, quote unquote, humbling and that higher fees were stifling innovation.

He said that he wanted the metaverse to reach a billion users within a decade and generate hundreds of billions of dollars in digital commerce.

There's a bunch of consulting firms.

I think McKinsey was one of them.