Expand / Artist’s rendering of Carmack’s VR avatar saying goodbye to Meta.
After nearly ten years, John Carmack’s time helping to guide the VR hardware efforts at Meta (and Facebook/Oculus before that) has come to an end. The id Software co-founder and Doom co-creator officially left Meta on Friday night, according to an internal company memo obtained by Insider and confirmed by the New York Times.
Carmack’s exit message serves as a scathing indictment of a crippling inefficiency in Meta that he said he was “offended” by and compared to a GPU with a five percent utilization rate. “We have a ridiculous amount of people and resources, but we constantly self-sabotage and waste effort. There’s no sugarcoating this,” he wrote. “I think our organization is running at half the efficiency that would make me happy.”
More personally, Carmack complained that it’s been a “struggle” for him to influence Meta’s overall direction and that he’s “tired of the struggle.” Despite his lofty title of “Consulting CTO/Executive Advisor,” Carmack complained that he’s “obviously not persuasive enough” to change Meta’s VR efforts for the better.
If this kind of talk sounds familiar, it may be because Carmack voiced similar complaints at his October keynote about Meta Connect. There he talked about his internal efforts to push the development of a “super cheap and very light” Meta VR headset that could reach “$250 and 250 grams”. Instead, Meta has put its latest VR hardware efforts behind the vastly overdesigned, $1,500 Quest Pro. “We are not building this [cheap, light] headset today, but I keep trying,” Carmack said with some exasperation during the presentation. Advertisement In his exit message, Carmack had some kind words for the best-selling Meta Quest 2 headset, which he called a good and successful product you have”[made] The world a better place.” However, at his October keynote, Carmack also bluntly told Meta that “the core usability of Quest really needs to improve” and that “our app launch times they’re slow, our transitions are jagged… We have to do much better… much, much faster to get into it.” Expand / Oculus CTO John Carmack couldn’t walk down the aisle at the conference 2016’s Oculus Connect without being mobbed by onlookers.call to court for lengthy impromptu question-and-answer sessions.
In late 2021, Carmack also had some words of caution when Facebook changed its name to Meta and completely swung behind the amorphous idea of the metaverse. Carmack said we should be wary of “architectural astronauts” who do a lot of high-level hand-wringing instead of building workable products that customers find useful.
To that end, Carmack threw down a public gauntlet for his fellow Meta employees, saying that “we should [Facebook Connect] in the metaverse” for the 2022 show. When Carmack introduced himself to an empty room as an awkward-looking avatar for the 2022 keynote, however, he said up front that “this here, this isn’t really the what did i mean”.
In an August podcast interview, Carmack said the nearly $1 billion Meta loses each month on its VR efforts makes him “sick of [his] stomach… But this is how they demonstrate the commitment to it… Google goes and cancels all these projects, while Meta really stays with VR and AR funding even further.”