Former co-founder of id Software and current VR Executive Consultant at Meta, John Carmack, has announced that he's resigning from his position. A legendary figure in the gaming industry, John Carmack has a rich tenure including work on Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, and Quake, and only left id Software back in 2013 to pursue the development of VR technologies at Facebook/Meta.
Carmack's work at Meta is most easily visible when discussing the Oculus lineup of VR headsets. These cutting-edge devices have defined the current state of virtual reality technology, and offer a great balance of price to performance for almost every VR-based use case. Carmack, however, appears to have taken issue with the efficiency with which Meta has been progressing.
The remarkably flexible Meta Quest 2 headset is, according to Carmack, "almost exactly what [he] wanted to see" in a VR headset, but he claims that "the issue is [Meta's] efficiency." Following up a leaked company announcement where Carmack let others know he'd be leaving Meta, he subsequently made the announcement on Facebook as well. "We have a ridiculous amount of people and resources," said Carmack, "but we constantly self-sabotage and squander effort." He explained that the process of working at Meta has been a struggle for him, and he felt that his feedback wasn't persuasive enough for the higher-ups to act upon it before minor problems compounded into substantial issues.
Carmack shared his concerns about the Metaverse not long ago, too, saying that he doesn't feel like a single company, Meta, should have so much sway in such a comprehensive virtual environment. This, too, is likely to be a part of Carmack's reasoning behind leaving Meta after a decade's worth of progress. Notably, Carmack is now going to proceed to work on his own startup, Keen Technologies, which focuses on researching the ever-elusive artificial general intelligence (AGI). While he seems to have been unhappy with how little influence he had within the context of Meta in the short term, Keen Technologies is likely to be more agile in this regard.
None of this is to say that Oculus will be scuttling anytime soon, of course. In fact, a recent Meta patent showed off interesting gaming gloves that could be rather game-changing for VR gamers. Yet, the fact that Carmack is leaving Meta is bound to be felt at some point, even though it might not come up until several years have gone by, depending on how far along internal projects may have been developed.
It may be worth pointing out that Meta has seen massive financial losses in Q2 of 2022. Though the CEO Mark Zuckerberg remains positive about the trajectory that the company is on, it doesn't seem like all of its ventures have been panning out as of late, with Meta receiving particularly substantial critique on the basis of its Metaverse endeavors.
Source: Facebook