A hard setback (and there have been a few) for Meta, but not an unexpected surprise, John Carmack’s departure from the company, which was announced a few hours ago. And I say it’s not surprising, because as recently as two months ago he was somewhat disappointed with both the Metaverse ecosystem in general and the advancements Meta has made in it specifically. Worse, there were also some important differences about how the company’s strategy should evolve.

As we have already told you, one of the points advocated by John Carmack, and on which I think the vast majority will agree, is that in order to popularize the Metaverse, it is essential that access to 3D technology be much cheaper than it is today. . Meta’s suggested entry point for this is the €450 Meta Quest 2, and Carmack advocated the need to launch an entry-level VR headset at a base price of €250. this would undoubtedly bring him closer to many other pockets. However, Meta decided to go high, with the presentation of the Meta Quest Pro worth 1,700 euros.

There were also disagreements about avatars. Meta aims to offer more realistic avatars (and who knew, looking at the current result…), while John Carmack took a very different stance: generate a large number of computationally cheap avatars using available hardware. It’s harder to take a side or the other at this point because they’re both defensible based on different criteria, but it’s clear that Carmack wasn’t comfortable with his criteria taking second place.

According to what we can read in Yahoo! Finance, John Carmack decided to end his relationship with Meta by resigning from his current positionafter taking the first step in that direction a little over three years ago, when he resigned as CTO of Oculus in 2019. At the time, Metaverse was still a work in progress, but at that time we already blamed some attrition on the father of some of the most important games in history, such as Quake and Doom, although at the time it seemed that the boredom was mainly due to a lack of development and market growth with virtual reality.

Now that he’s leaving Meta, John Carmack is voicing his frustration again, as he did a few months ago, saying that despite his role in the company, his opinion didn’t serve to stop some of the movements he felt were wrong. “I have a voice at the highest levels here, so I feel like I should be able to move things along.“, in an internal note accessed by the outlet, John Carmack would be, “but I’ve never been able to stop stupid things before they do damage, or set a direction and get the team to really stick to it“.

The loss of John Carmack comes at a critical time for the Metaverse, or more accurately, the Meta’s bet on him. With accounts that don’t come out, users that don’t come in, development that takes forever, shareholders that despair and massive layoffs to cut losses, having one of the most visible and recognizable faces of your initiative leave in frustration only serves to fuel the perception that we’re facing a ship , which doesn’t fly anywhere.