How Facebook can save Oculus and win at VR
Oculus is in some trouble. You may have heard of the manufacturing issues, or the delayed launch of motion tracked controllers. Those are not what I’m talking about — even in the next year, these issues will be smoothed out and then forgotten. But in these short term struggles, Oculus has revealed a business strategy that is unfortunate, mostly because there’s a better one that Facebook is primed to pursue.
I don’t want to dwell on the recent controversy over exclusive games, because what’s interesting is what it has revealed about the company’s strategy. By competing via exclusivity contracts with other distribution channels, but also not opening up their ecosystem more broadly, it implies that their strategy is to build a tightly-integrated hardware and software ecosystem with the goal of making money by selling both hardware and software. This is Apple’s business model, and it works very well for them.
But Oculus isn’t Apple, as people smarter than I have pointed out. By choosing to frame their battle this way, they’re fighting a multi-front war and — as blunt as this sounds — they’re losing on all fronts. Google’s Daydream ecosystem is poised to overtake the singular GearVR/Samsung pairing in quality as Cardboard has already done in quantity. Valve’s Steam has already pulled ahead of Oculus’s Rift store by most metrics, and Microsoft’s Windows Store Holo stands to steal more market share. Whatever Apple cooks up can’t help either. Given these struggles, plus the realization that once the market matures, people install new apps less and less frequently, this doesn’t seem like a winning strategy. And it’s not winning over many fans among the gaming crowd in the meantime.
There is a way out. Something interesting has happened in the game engine space recently: after years of investment and expansion with many companies and ideas, we’ve entered into a consolidation phase in the game engine market. The peace dividends are that these game engines are now extremely low cost and exceedingly powerful. Unity in particular has captured an enormous amount of market share in VR/AR, with numbers like 90% market share being thrown around but not able to be realistically substantiated.
Facebook should buy Unity and instead of focusing on an app store ecosystem via exclusivity, focus on making sure its developer platform is the absolute hands-down best to build for. Facebook can then make enormous amounts of money by charging companies for all the services they need in order to make their VR apps and games successful — including marketing!
Marketing is something almost every developer wants once they release their app or game, and on the app marketing front Facebook is hard to beat. But marketing is just one area where this makes sense. How about networking and matchmaking services, speech recognition for voice input while in VR, computer vision for any augmented reality needs, video/audio encoding/decoding/streaming for obvious reasons, or analytics to help developers understand how their VR experiences are being used and distributed? These are all things that companies will pay for, would be best if they were integrated with the developer platform, and these are all areas where Facebook is strong!
The best part is that under this business model, it’s in Facebook’s interest to help developers distribute their games and apps as widely as possible, into as many app stores as possible — maybe even to the web someday. Speaking of the web, Facebook’s React and React Native teams are killing it lately, and I have personally prototyped and shown that you can marry React and VR. If Facebook owned Unity, they could open up the engine to React Native developers, that fast-growing ecosystem they already invest in. It doesn’t take much imagination to see how this could lead to some very strategic long-term products, maybe shaped something like a browser.
As you make it easier for developers to build and, importantly, to market and widely distribute apps, you will see more and better content developed for VR. Having more and better VR content makes it more likely that people will find something that convinces them to purchase a headset. More people with headsets means a bigger market for Facebook to connect developers with. This is a positive reinforcement loop where VR grows, consumer satisfaction improves, and both Facebook and developers make lots of money.
Can you even imagine a better thing for the future of VR? Oh and hey, if Facebook doesn’t pursue this strategy, maybe another company with similar strengths will, like Amazon or Google.
Note: One thing that’s hard to reconcile with this strategy is Facebook’s recent shutdown and open-sourcing of Parse. There may be some scar tissue there, but it’s a whole different ballgame when Unity already provides everything else to the developer, and it’s just another checkbox to add speech recognition service (or any other service that FB could charge for.)
