and you can’t buy your way into a platform’s worth of content.
That’s exactly how Xbox started. Microsoft lost something like four billion on Xbox, bought Bungie, Rare, etc. to get high quality games on their console and sold the console at a loss. Once the next generation came around, Xbox360 was a big hit.
Meta spend double the time and more than 5x that money and VR still can’t get any real traction.
you’re selling the hardware at a huge loss,
It’s not a huge loss, it’s around $50 that they lost on Quest2 hardware on release.
The idea was to get money from the games and the data funnel,
In the future. VR isn’t established enough to milk it for profits.
The issue is that when I’m using a monitor I want to be able to also look at other stuff.
That’s not an issue, that has been solved for years with pass-through.
If I want to check my phone
Pass-through aside, you can stream your phone into VR with Microsoft Phone Link.
I don’t want to be looking at things through a camera
Good pass-through is essentially indistinguishable from reality.
Simply put, the “problems” you list there are problems because the current VR space is an unfinished mess when it comes to regular 2D apps. Companies still use $1 tracking cameras for passthrough instead of stereo RGB cameras, they still lack depth sensors to allow proper composition of virtual and real objects, and the software side lacks smooth integration and lots of fundamental features.
Guess who doesn’t have any of those problems because they actually cared and finished the product instead of giving up half the way through? Apple Vision Pro.