The shortage in the consumer electronics market affects badly small companies like us and it is not going to be resolved in the near future. Semiconductors crave for big orders while investors see too many risks for substantial investment. Even if we solve the financial issues and produce the headset as is, its current price is ~$700, more than double the cost of the Quest 2.
We don’t want to sell expensive hardware, as high prices cripple VR growth potential.
Despite the issues in the market, Facebook continues to manufacture and sell the Q2 for the same price. They can do it forever because they write this subsidization as an investment which will yield profit at a later stage through their ecosystem. This is a double-edged sword for the XR market because while they are expediting usage with great products at low prices they also get to monopolize the market.
Even at $700, we don’t have a sustainable business model as once you guys get the DecaGear headset, you will buy content on SteamVR and Valve are not splitting their store revenues with anyone.
First and foremost, we are not stopping, we are here, working. We have invested a lot of time, resources, passion and money from our own pockets in this venture. And we have pre-orders from 10 thousands members of this great community!
So what now? It is time to pivot and change to a direction that will allow us to build a future in VR towards an open ecosystem. I started with the inability of device makers like us to compete with ecosystems such as Facebook (Meta), but this is true for content publishers as well because they are bound by the rules and restrictions of the host ecosystem, dictating what content to publish and how to monetize it. (Epic – Apple case is a good example)
Similar to the situation in the ‘Mobile Web’ where we can choose between the AppStore or the PlayStore, we will soon see a few mega-corporations corner the XR market through controlled ecosystems. I also don’t think that the current status quo where Facebook allows using their headsets with SteamVR will continue for long. It is serving a purpose for now.
We think that we manage to form a solution and I will share more about it here during the next week.
This is the new timeline for DecaGear and I am really sorry we didn’t manage to execute the previous timeline on time:
* Q2 2022 – Blogger edition goes to bloggers
* Q4 2022 – Limited edition of DecaGear is produce and shipped by us
* Q4 2022 – DecaGear is sold and shipped by other device makers (this is part of the new solution which I will share soon)
* Q2 2023 DecaBrick OS is released
* Q3 2023 DecaBrick is sold and shipped by other device makers
You guys are the pioneers of our industry. In a few years from now, most of the current internet users will use XR devices on a daily basis for browsing the spatial web and I hope we will see a different picture from how the ‘Mobile Web’ looks today.
Will be in touch very soon.
– Or Kuntzman
