The VR industry is not for the weak and the squeamish

The VR industry needs companies with resilience and a long-term vision. According to recent reports, PICOParent company ByteDance is not one of them.

PICO 着手挑战 MetaVR的垄断。 现在，这家公司摇摇欲坠，摇摇欲坠，令工作室、粉丝和整个 VR 行业感到沮丧。 发生了什么？

TikTok owner ByteDance acquired the Chinese headset maker in 2021, and PICO 4 was released in Western markets in the fall of 2022. It is the first standalone VR headset Meta Quest 2 to challenge VR in terms of technology and price. The media welcomed the competitor's arrival. However, the device is not available from Meta, in part because it was never released in the United States.

Rumors of a radical restructuring of the company have been circulating for weeks. There's been talk of massive layoffs, canceled software projects, and a shift in product strategy to pivot PICO to Meta which is Apple's approach.

PICO itself has issued a statement confirming that it will continue to invest in the future of its platform. However, there have been no concrete announcements as to what this might look like. Will there be a successor to PICO? 4. Will the company continue to fund VR content, and to what extent? we do not know.

PICO was tripped up by his own ambition.

The sparseness of reporting and communications from PICO raises questions about whether VR studios or consumers should continue to invest in the platform.

PICO, which launched a single product for Western consumers, is already showing signs of weakness after modest success. Don't executives realize that it will take many years and billions of dollars just to keep up with Meta? Worse: PICO now clearly wants to catch up to Apple, even though it hasn't even touched Meta yet.

After last year’s release of PICO 4, I listed five reasons why I wasn’t ready to make the switch to the PICO ecosystem. One reason is skepticism about the long-term investment PICO its parent company ByteDance is willing to make.

“Virtual reality will be a loss-making business for many years to come. It will take a lot of stamina from companies and innovators. Especially when competitors are called Meta and gain a significant lead. If ByteDance gives up too early and scale back investment, the PICO ecosystem may collapse before it even takes off," I wrote at the time.

The VR industry is cruel

I have nothing against PICO. My skepticism is justified and is also directed at other companies that will enter the market in the next few years. Samsung and Google, for example, have tried VR in the past but abandoned the platform after failing to achieve quick success. All companies are driven by profit, and VR and AR do not guarantee an immediate return on investment. VR and AR are a risky bet that must be sustained for the long term.

The road to VR history is littered with dead platforms, and anyone who's ever been involved has asked themselves twice whether it's worth the risk of re-entering. As a result, companies that are only into VR are hurting the industry, developers, and consumers.

Valve has a bleeding nose, so does Sony, and I think Apple is about to be next. Valve VR's efforts seemed to have stalled after the release of Half-Life: Alyx, Sony admitted that Playstation VR 2 was not its core proposition, and I'm waiting to see if Apple is still singing the song of spatial computing three years from now.

Meta aside, I think Apple is the company most likely to think long term and keep its promises because of the amazing engineering effort that the Vision Pro represents. But I could be wrong.