I think it may have been beneficial to keep its "work-in-progress" status a little more "up-front", but let's not forget that Zuckerberg's Facebook brought the Oculus GO to us, which was my first serious inroads into VR, and in spite of the Oculus "Go's" limitations (and more likely because of them), I bought the Quest 2 with maxed-out storage instantly.
Now I am looking at getting the Quest Pro within a couple of weeks, **bleep** the torpedoes!
I am in agreement with Zuck that VR is the future of many things, but like all brand-new and disruptive technologies, the vast count of potential applications make a lot of early attempts look like solutions seeking problems.
People are divesting Meta from their portfolios?
Fine, more for me!!!
Because I know for a fact, that at least within industrial circles, virtual reality will provide the best training tools for heavy industry, hands-down, even if the "social media" aspects take years to work-out, and industry has plenty of money for furthering these efforts.
Is VR Chat "better" than horizon worlds? Perhaps, but well, it SHOULD be, because it's OLDER, and was NOT designed specifically for VR. This makes it understandably more developed than Horizon Worlds, which has barely had a chance to gain any traction.
Perhaps "beta" releases to give the public a "feel" aren't always the best course, especially when you own the entire platform where others are being allowed to create content. Horizon Worlds is released with promises of improvement, and these promises would become realized sooner or later, but consumers expect "completeness", which promises can't fulfill.
After all, if you own the platform, and 3rd-party content creation is coming along, why expose your underdeveloped project? Bide your time, see what other developers are doing, create similar but potentially better experiences, and then "blow them all away" (or at least appear reasonably competitive) with your first release.
It's water under the bridge now, but I will not abandon Meta so early in its evolution.
