Is there any company that's even close to Oculus in the VR space? I know HTC's Vive and Valve's Index could compete with the Rift, but they didn't have the Oculus app ecosystem. Samsung's standalone died, same with Google. Is there anything equivalent to the Quest 2?
Given that Valve's next big product is a cheaper portable non-VR gaming system with a (planned) seamless onboarding experience, I wouldn't be at all surprised if it was a test run for a future portable VR set to compete with the Quest.
Valve, with their already existing VR ecosystem, is probably the best positioned to compete in the space.
The main thing Valve has going for it is good will among the gaming population, which Facebo- Meta certainly doesn’t (to a stupid extent, IMO).
However, Zuckerberg said during the keynote that they were going to continue to sell hardware at or below cost in order to grow the space. I’m sure that’s somewhat of a business decision, but I honestly think Zuckerberg has a genuine interest in the technology and just wants to move it forward. While Valve could technically also sell at or below cost and hope to make it up with their Steam cut, they haven’t been willing to do that with any other hardware release.
Valve has the best immersive PC gaming platform in the world (eg not things like Farmville, but games pushing the limits of immersive 3D tech). The only real competitors to Steam are consoles. Games have traditionally been the main driver of home PC hardware, so I wouldn't count Valve out easily.
Valve has the best immersive PC gaming platform in the world...
Facebook cannot do VR based on games. It wouldn't bring in enough money to sustain it. They're going after a much bigger market.
The entire global PC gaming market was worth $42b in 2019. It's up a bit since then, but not by much[1]. That's equivalent to about 5 months of Facebook's revenue[2]. In other words, in terms of revenue, Facebook is double the size of the entire PC gaming market.
It doesn't really matter how good or how big Valve are. They're a big fish in a small pond compared to Facebook.
You mean the platform where you could change the password of any user account by going through account recovery and leaving the password blank? (That was exploitable for many years)
As long as Facebook keeps investing in exclusives for their platform while Valve doesn't they'll keep losing market share, no matter what new headsets they come out with.
