Once a VR true believer, a “wearied” John Carmack leaves Meta

John Carmack's time at Meta and at Facebook/Oculus have come to an end. According to an internal company memo obtained by Insider and confirmed by the New York Times, the co- founder and co- creator of id Software left Meta on Friday night.

Carmack said in his departure message that he was "offended by" the inefficiency at Meta and compared it to a graphics card with a meager utilization rate. We have a lot of people and resources but we waste them. There is no way to make this look good. Our organization is not doing enough to make me happy.

It has been difficult for Carmack to influence Meta's overall direction and he is tired of the fight. Carmack said that he is not persuasive enough to change Meta's virtual reality efforts.

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 heavily overdesigned and $1,500 Quest Pro. "We're not building that [cheap, light] headset today, but I keep trying," Carmack said with some exasperation during the keynote. Advertisement 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 has "[made] the world a better place." In his October keynote, though, Carmack also bluntly told Meta that "the basic usability of Quest really does need to get better" and that "our app startup times are slow, our transitions are glitchy... We need to make it a whole lot better... much, much faster to get into."

Carmack had warned about the change of Facebook's name to Meta and the idea of the metaverse. Carmack said we should be wary of "architecture astronauts" who do a lot of hand-waving instead of building useful products.

Carmack said that "we should be doing Facebook connect in the metaverse" for the show in 2022. Carmack said up front that this wasn't what he meant when he showed up in an empty room.

Carmack said in an August interview that he's sick to his stomach because Meta is losing $1 billion a month on its virtual reality efforts. That is how they show their commitment. Meta is sticking with the funding of virtual and augmented reality even further out with it.