Facebook’s Meta VR leader resigns, but the company still plans to spend 20% of the annual budget on ‘Metaverse’

Doom videogame creator and VR pioneer John Carmack finally stepped down amid concerns about Metaverse's success.

John Carmack, one of Metaverse's architects and co-creator of Doom leaves the Meta as 'consulting CTO', according to an internal company memo obtained by Insider and confirmed by the NYT. He worked for a company nearly for ten years.

Carmack is mostly known for creating the videogame 'Doom' and co-founding a game-studio id Software, that had a great impact on the whole game industry. The id Tech engine was developed in the studio and used in different projects like Wolfenstein, Quake, Doom, and others.

In 2013 Carmack believed in VR as the technology of the future so much that he left id Software to work at Oculus – the company behind popular VR helmets. But just a year later Facebook acquired Oculus for $2 billion.

Now, Carmack decided to leave Meta because he "struggles" to influence the company's overall direction and is "wearied of the fight". As he complained, he couldn't change Meta's VR efforts for the better.

We have a ridiculous amount of people and resources, but we constantly self-sabotage and squander effort. There is no way to sugarcoat this. I think our organization is operating at half the effectiveness that would make me happy.

Despite Carmack's resignation, Meta plans to continue to spend a bunch of money on Metaverse. In a blog post by Andrew Bosworth, head of Reality Labs, Meta will devote 20% of the annual budget to Metaverse in 2023. The rest of the money will go to the core apps – Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger.

In 2022 Meta stocks is down nearly 65% and some investors have questioned Mark Zuckerberg's bet on the metaverse. Reality Labs reported a loss of $9,4 billion in just the first nine months of the year. Other apps brought in roughly $32 billion in profit during that same period.