Meta seems very interested in creating hardware that opens up a whole new world, and moving away from the games that drive its VR business. 

Meta changed its name because it wanted you to forever associate it with the nascent meta universe. The hardware it produces is meant to be our window into that meta-universe. When you pick up your Meta Quest 2 headset and put it on your head, you should gasp and quietly marvel at this new virtual world. But I put my Meta Quest 2 to play Beat Saber or Tetris or maybe Pistol Whip . It's not a terminal to the meta universe - it's a gaming console. And I don't think Meta realises that.

Earlier this week my extremely famous colleague Alex Heath reported on Meta's VR and AR headset roadmap from Meta . There are smart glasses that sound pretty much like the ones released by North back in 2019, only Meta's glasses will be controlled via a neural interface when they launch in two years' time. There is an extremely ambitious augmented reality headset codenamed Orion that will apparently "project high-quality avatar holograms into the real world" and will launch in 2027. These projects are costly big swings for Meta and its pivot to the meta-universe, and it should be exciting. Just late last year we got Meta's first big meta-universe, Meta Quest Pro for $1,499 . The product was an absolute useless device. The accompanying Horizon World software,is so bad that even the people who make it don't want to use it . This software should be the gateway to the meta universe . If it sucks, then Meta's view of the meta universe is pretty much stuck in the water. 

But as bad as Meta is in the meta-universe, the company is really very good at virtual reality. Virtual reality should certainly be a component of the meta universe, but judging by the current product line, that's not the part that Meta is good at. It's good for creating a console that people want to play games on. According to The Verge's own report , Mark Rabkin, Meta's VP of VR, told staff that Meta has so far sold over 20 million Quest headsets. This includes both Quest and Quest 2. IDC previously estimatedMeta has sold around 15 million Quest 2 headsets, which probably means that Quest 2 makes up the majority of the headsets sold. That seems like a small number, but Nintendo's GameCube has only sold 21 million consoles over its lifetime, and the Xbox Series X and S are estimated to have sold around 20 million consoles so far.