Berkeley — The prominent video game creator who spearheaded Facebook’s expansion into virtual reality has resigned from the social-networking service’s parent company after becoming disillusioned with the way the technology was managed.
John Carmack cut ties with Meta Platforms, the holding company founded last year by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, in a letter Friday to establish himself as an executive consultant for virtual reality. vented his frustration.
“There is no way to sugarcoat this. I believe our organization operates at half the efficiency that I am happy with,” Carmack wrote in a letter shared on Facebook. Some may sneer and claim that things are going well, while others laugh and say, “Half?” Ha! Four times less efficient! ”
In response to inquiries about Carmack’s resignation and remarks, Meta on Saturday passed on a tweet from Andrew Bosworth, chief technology officer and head of Reality Labs, to The Associated Press. “It is impossible to overstate the impact you have had on our work and the industry as a whole.
Carmack’s resignation means Meta CEO Zuckerberg is wasting billions of dollars trying to found a company in Menlo Park, Calif., in the “Metaverse,” an artificial world filled with avatars of real people. It took place at a time when we were battling a widely held perception that .
While the metaverse’s losses grow, related services such as Facebook and Instagram suffer from a slump in advertising, which drives most of the company’s revenue. The decline comes as concerns about an economic slowdown, increased competition from other social networking services such as TikTok, and Apple’s privacy controls on his iPhone make it harder to track people’s interests and sell ads. This is the cause.
These challenges have caused Meta’s stock to lose nearly two-thirds of its value so far this year, wiping out about $575 billion in shareholder wealth.
Nick Uto / AP
Carmack only worked part-time at Meta, but the disappointment he expressed was that he wanted to dominate virtual reality much like Facebook has done in social networking since the service launched nearly two decades ago. It seems likely to amplify looming questions about Zuckerberg’s efforts to do so. He attends Harvard University.
Zuckerberg began exploring virtual reality in earnest in 2014 with Facebook’s $2 billion acquisition of headset maker Oculus. Carmack was his Oculus chief technology officer at the time and joined Facebook after the deal closed. Before joining Oculus, Carmack was best known as the co-creator of the video game Doom.
Federal regulators are now trying to limit Zuckerberg’s influence in virtual reality by blocking him from buying Within Unlimited, which develops fitness apps designed for the metaverse. .
Carmack testified earlier this week in a trial between the Federal Trade Commission and Meta over the fate of the deal. Mr. Zuckerberg is scheduled to testify at some point in the trial, which is scheduled to resume Monday in San Jose, Calif.
Frustrated with the current state of Meta, Carmack praised the Quest 2, the latest virtual reality headset, in his resignation letter. He described the headset as “pretty much what I wanted to see from the start during my tenure at Oculus.”
Carmack said of Quest 2, “It’s successful, and successful products make the world a better place. If a different decision had been made, everything could have happened a little sooner and gone better.” Yes, but we built something pretty close to that. Right.”
However, Carmack ended the letter with a plea:
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