Miffed Virtual Reality Pioneer Walks Away From Facebook's Parent

A prominent video game creator who helped lead Facebook's expansion into virtual reality has resigned from the social networking service's corporate parent after becoming disillusioned with the way the technology is being managed, Mainichi Shimbun reported.

Photo Insert: Prominent video game creator John Carmack has cut his ties with Meta Platforms.

John Carmack cut his ties with Meta Platforms, a holding company created last year by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, in a letter dated Dec. 16 that vented his frustration as he stepped down as an executive consultant in virtual reality.

"There is no way to sugar coat this; I think our organization is operating at half the effectiveness that would make me happy," Carmack wrote in the letter, which he shared on Facebook.

"’Some may scoff and contend we are doing just fine, but others will laugh and say, 'Half? Ha! I'm at quarter efficiency!'"

In response to an inquiry about Carmack's resignation and remarks, Meta on Saturday directed the Associated Press (AP) to a tweet from its chief technology officer and head of its reality labs, Andrew Bosworth.

"It is impossible to overstate the impact you've had on our work and the industry as a whole," Bosworth wrote in his grateful tweet addressed to Carmack.

His departure comes at a time that Zuckerberg, Meta's CEO, has been battling widespread perceptions that he has been wasting billions of dollars trying to establish the Menlo Park, California, company in the "metaverse" -- an artificial world filled with avatars of real people.

While the metaverse losses have been mounting, Facebook and affiliated services such as Instagram have been suffering a downturn in advertising that brings in most of the company's revenue.

The decline has been brought on by a combination of recession fears, tougher competition from other social networking services such as TikTok and privacy controls on Apple's iPhone that have made it tougher to track people's interests to help sell ads.

Those challenges have caused Meta's stock to lose nearly two-thirds of its value so far this year, wiping out about $575 billion in shareholder wealth.

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