Once a VR true believer, a “wearied” John Carmack leaves Meta
After nearly ten years, John Carmack’s time helping lead VR hardware efforts at Meta (and at Facebook/Oculus before that) has come to an end. The id Software co-founder and Doom co-creator officially left the company Friday night, according to an internal company memo obtained by Insider and confirmed by the New York Times.
Carmack’s departure message serves as a scathing indictment of a crippling inefficiency at Meta that he said he was “offended” by and which he compared to a GPU that can only muster a paltry 5% utilization. “We have a ridiculous amount of people and resources, but we are constantly sabotaging and wasting effort. There is no way to sugarcoat it,” he wrote. “I think the organization is operating 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 fight.” Despite his high ranking “consulting CTO”/”executive advisor” title, Carmack complained that he “apparently isn’t convincing enough” to change Meta’s VR efforts for the better.
If that kind of talk sounds familiar, it might be because Carmack voiced similar complaints in his October Meta Connect keynote. There, he talked about his internal efforts to push for the development of a “super cheap, super lightweight” Meta VR headset that could come in at “$250 and 250 grams.” Instead, Meta has put its recent VR hardware efforts behind the grossly overdesigned $1,500 Quest Pro. “We don’t build it [cheap, light] headset today, but I keep trying,” Carmack said with some dismay during the keynote address.
In his departure message, Carmack had some kind words for the strong-selling Meta Quest 2 headset, which he called a good, successful product that “[made] the world a better place.” However, in his October keynote, Carmack also bluntly told Meta that “the basic usability of Quest really needs to get better,” and that “our application times are slow, our transitions are buggy. We have to make it much better … much, much faster to get in.”
By the end of 2021, Carmack also had some words of warning, as Facebook changed its name to Meta and fully pivoted behind the amorphous idea of the metaverse. Carmack said we should be wary of “architecture astronauts” who do a lot of high-level hand-waving instead of building viable products that real customers find useful.
To that end, Carmack laid down a public gauntlet for his fellow Meta employees that “we should [Facebook Connect] in the metaverse” for the 2022 show. However, when Carmack showed up to an empty room as an awkward avatar for the 2022 keynotes, he prefaced that “this here, that’s not really what I meant. “
In a podcast interview in August, Carmack said that the nearly $1 billion that Meta loses each month on its VR efforts makes him “sick of [his] belly… But that’s how they demonstrate their commitment to this… Google goes and cancels all these projects, while Meta really sticks with funding VR and AR even further with it.”
