So Facebook had its Q2 earnings call yesterday, and buried under the usual stock-price stuff was Zuckerberg going on at length about "the metaverse." Not as a joke, not as a slide he flashed for two seconds. He spent real time on it, telling analysts that in a few years he wants people to think of Facebook as a metaverse company first and a social media company second. That's a pretty wild thing to say out loud to people whose job is to model your ad revenue for the next quarter.
If you missed it, he did this big rambling interview with Casey Newton at The Verge last week too, laying out basically the same pitch in more detail — this idea of an interconnected set of virtual spaces where you go to work, hang out, play games, whatever, and you carry your identity and your stuff across all of it. He kept using the word "embodied internet," which is one of those phrases that sounds impressive until you say it three times and realize it doesn't mean much yet.
I want to be clear I'm not dismissing the idea outright. I've had an Oculus Quest 2 since Christmas (the 64GB one, $299, which honestly feels like a fair price for what it is) and there are moments in Beat Saber or messing around in a random social VR app where it does feel like something new is happening. But there's a huge gap between "this headset is neat for twenty minutes at a time" and "this is going to replace the internet as most people use it." My Quest sits on the shelf more than it doesn't, mostly because strapping a brick to my face makes me sweaty and a little nauseous after forty minutes, and I don't think that's a me problem, I think that's a hardware-and-software-in-2021 problem.
What gets me is the timing of all this. Facebook's actual numbers yesterday were fine (they beat on revenue, something like $29 billion for the quarter) but they also warned that growth is going to slow down a lot in the back half of the year, partly because of Apple's app tracking changes messing with their ad targeting. So you've got a company telling investors "our core business is about to get harder" in the same breath as "but also we're becoming a totally different kind of company, trust us." Maybe that's coincidence. I don't totally believe it's coincidence.
There's also something a little funny about a company whose current product is struggling with trust issues, people don't love how much Facebook already knows about them, pitching a future where you spend even more of your day inside their stuff, wearing their hardware, generating even richer data about how you move your head and where your eyes go. I'm not saying that to be dramatic, it's just the obvious next question and I haven't seen anyone on that earnings call ask it directly.
Anyway. Separately, and only sort of related, I put five bucks down on a Steam Deck reservation the day Valve announced it a couple weeks back. Not because I need another handheld (I've got a Switch collecting dust already, don't even get me started on how little I've played Breath of the Wild since finishing it) but because the idea of a proper PC in that form factor, running my actual Steam library, is different enough that I wanted in line early. Starts at $399 for the base model, goes up to $649 if you want the fancy anti-glare glass and faster storage. Supposedly shipping in December, though I'd bet real money that slips.
Also, small aside because it's been the background noise of this whole week: the CDC walked back its mask guidance again on Tuesday, recommending vaccinated people mask up indoors in high-transmission areas because of the Delta variant. Feels like we did this dance in reverse about two months ago and now we're doing it again, forward. Not a tech story exactly, but it's hard to write about metaverses and virtual escape hatches from reality without noticing that the actual world outside my window is still pretty stubbornly unsolved.