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Once a VR true believer, a “wearied” John Carmack leaves Meta

Departing CTO rails against "inefficiency" and "self-sabotage" in the Meta ranks.

Kyle Orland | 304
Artist's conception of Carmack's VR avatar waving goodbye to Meta.
Artist's conception of Carmack's VR avatar waving goodbye to Meta.

After nearly 10 years, John Carmack's time helping to guide VR hardware efforts at Meta (and at Facebook/Oculus before that) have come to a close. The id Software co-founder and Doom co-creator officially left Meta on Friday night, according to an internal company memo obtained by Insider and confirmed by The New York Times.

Carmack's departure message serves as a scathing indictment of crippling inefficiency at Meta that he said he was "offended by" and that he compared to a GPU with a measly 5 percent utilization rate. "We have a ridiculous amount of people and resources, but we constantly self-sabotage and squander effort. There is no way to sugar coat this," he wrote. "I think our organization is operating at half the effectiveness that would make me happy."

More personally, Carmack complained that it has been a "struggle" for him to influence Meta's overall direction and that he's "wearied of the fight." Despite his high-ranking "consulting CTO / executive advisor" title, Carmack complained that he is "evidently not persuasive enough" to change Meta's VR efforts for the better.

If that kind of talk sounds familiar, it might be because Carmack voiced similar complaints in his October Meta Connect keynote. There he talked about his internal efforts to push for the development of a "super cheap, super lightweight" Meta VR headset that could come in at "$250 and 250 grams." Instead, Meta has put its recent VR hardware efforts behind the heavily overdesigned and expensive $1,500 Quest Pro. "We're not building that [cheap, light] headset today, but I keep trying," Carmack said with some exasperation during the keynote.

In his departure message, Carmack had some kind words for the strong-selling Meta Quest 2 headset, which he called a good, successful product that has "[made] the world a better place." In his October keynote, though, Carmack also bluntly told Meta that "the basic usability of Quest really does need to get better" and that "our app startup times are slow, our transitions are glitchy... We need to make it a whole lot better... much, much faster to get into."

Oculus CTO John Carmack couldn't walk down the hall of the 2016 Oculus Connect conference without being mobbed by onlookers. He was happy to hold court for long impromptu Q&A sessions.
Oculus CTO John Carmack couldn't walk down the hall of the 2016 Oculus Connect conference without being mobbed by onlookers. He was happy to hold court for long impromptu Q&A sessions.

Back in late 2021, Carmack also had some words of warning as Facebook changed its named to Meta and pivoted fully behind the amorphous idea of the metaverse. Carmack said we should be wary of "architecture astronauts" who do a lot of high-level hand-waving instead of building viable products that customers find useful.

To that end, Carmack threw down a public gauntlet for his fellow Meta employees, saying that "we should be doing [Facebook Connect] in the metaverse" for the 2022 show. When Carmack showed up in an empty room as an awkward-looking avatar for the 2022 keynote, though, he said up front that "this here, this isn't really what I meant."

In an August podcast interview, Carmack said that the nearly $1 billion Meta is losing every month on its VR efforts makes him "sick to [his] stomach... But that's how they demonstrate commitment to this ... Google goes and cancels all these projects, while Meta is really sticking with the funding of VR and AR even further out with it."

A VR true believer

Carmack joined Oculus in 2013 as a true believer in the world-changing potential of virtual reality, after being wowed by a pre-Kickstarter demo of a prototype Oculus headset at E3 2012. He was bullish enough on the early tech to officially end a 22-year career at id Software just a few months after joining Oculus.

John Carmack, seen here wearing an early prototype Oculus Rift headset.

During his time at Oculus (and then Facebook), Carmack helped spearhead the company's early untethered headsets, including the Samsung-smartphone-powered Gear VR and then the low-priced, low-powered Oculus Go (which he officially unlocked via a software update long after it stopped being sold). By 2018, he was talking up the first Quest headset as a potential competitor for the Nintendo Switch.

"Completely mobile VR is a magical thing," Carmack said in 2014. "It's a hard problem to do well."

John Carmack (left) poses with Oculus founder Palmer Luckey (center) and other members of the Oculus team. Credit: OculusVR

By 2019, though, Carmack's official role as CTO was scaled back to consulting CTO. It's a move that coincided with Carmack's public pivot to work on "artificial general intelligence," an area he said was "possible, enormously valuable, and that [he had] a non-negligible chance of making a difference" in helping become reality. By August, Carmack's startup, Keen Technologies (named after a certain '80s PC game commander), had raised $20 million for those efforts.

Carmack's departure removes one of the last through lines Meta had to the "old guard" of executives who helped lead early VR headset efforts at Oculus long before its absorption into Facebook/Meta. Co-founder Palmer Luckey was forced out of the company in 2017 amid political controversy, while co-founder and former CEO Brendan Iribe left in 2018 and co-founder and former VP of Product Nate Mitchell left in 2019. Naughty Dog co-founder Jason Rubin, who joined Oculus as Head of Worldwide Studios in 2014, remains at Meta as the company's VP of Metaverse Content.

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Kyle Orland Senior Gaming Editor
Kyle Orland has been the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica since 2012, writing primarily about the business, tech, and culture behind video games. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He once wrote a whole book about Minesweeper.
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