A tweet by John Carmack contains some interesting thoughts on (emphasis mine):
I see some positive things in the leaked @boztank memo, but I worry that the top level strategic direction is flawed.
“We need to drive sales, retention, and engagement across the board but especially in MR. And Horizon Worlds on mobile absolutely has to break out for our long term plans to have a chance.”
Why would you say “especially in MR”?
Mixed Reality is seen by some as a stepping stone to the future fantasy AR world that justifies all past losses, so it gets more focus than it objectively deserves.
A good pass-through video background makes sense for lots of apps, and this has delivered real user value. Adapting simulated experiences to the physical world has made for compelling demos, but there are fundamental experience design reasons why it is harder to make mainstream experiences with long term retention that way.
Developers should be aware of where it can be a positive user experience, and may choose to bend their designs somewhat to take advantage when it makes sense, but setting out to “make an MR app” instead of “make a valuable app” is already a step off the path of steepest value ascent.
I’m always ready to have the market show me to be in error, but I don’t think it has.
“And Horizon Worlds on mobile absolutely has to break out for our long term plans to have a chance.”
You have just assigned infinite value to one outcome, which encourages everyone to favor marginal improvements there over larger improvements elsewhere.
If you had stopped at “We need to drive sales, retention, and engagement across the board”, and added “above all else”, it would have been a great memo!
Really curious what exactly “Horizon Worlds on mobile” entails. Is “mobile” (only) standalone XR headsets, or also mobile phones?
In the same discussion, more terminology confusion. From Meta Is Now Using “Mixed Reality” To Mean Both MR And VR:
This makes the contents of the leaked memo, on which Carmack commented, somewhat less XR-focused than it seems. And other than the “legendary misadventure” words does not contain that much interesting.