What they are seeing is insane user and revenue growth. It's that simple. ChatGPT has like a billion users, and it came out 3 years ago. And then AI is getting better every year in a way that internet companies like Google or Facebook didn't. Google peaked very early in terms of usefulness, then it just spent decades monetizing it. AI is not even funded by ads, people are actually paying for it. It's really hard to get people to pay for something. I don't know if the investors will get a nice return, but given the numbers they're seeing I understand why they're doing it.
What's different is that Meta has sold 20+ million headsets, and there is a decent sized user base, albeit much smaller than people expected 5 years ago. This is not a dead technology just because you don't use it. In 2023 Meta Quest had roughly 6.3 million monthly active users.
So, in some sense not a lot, but it has a decent foothold of people using it often. It's clearly different from VR in the past where there were literally a handful or maybe on the order of hundreds of headsets in the world. VR now also has a ton of different niches and use cases beyond games. I also think a comparison with gaming console hardware is more apt than comparing it to something like PC or smartphone sales.
VR is in the trough of disillusionment phase right now, but I can almost guarantee you we'll see a slow but steady climb from here. The big question is if Meta will continue to invest into the space or if other smaller players will fill its place.
If you're allocating stuff every frame you'll run into problems quickly. Sure, you can use an object pool or arena allocator, but then you're basically circumventing GC.
Game dev in general has a much tighter feedback loop than most software. If you're leaking memory, you're doing that a hundred times a second. If your code is slow you get visual stuttering. If you want performant code you need to think about things like cache coherence, you can't use GC etc.
This is exactly how I'd put it, and also why I absolutely hate context switches. When you're asking me to switch context, for example to a different project, then I have to bring in the project structure, the modules the moving pieces, the problem we're trying to solve, everything before I can remember enough to answer your question.
Would like to know as well. Whenever I suggest something new it's a default "NO!". But if it just happens naturally it's ok. Like if I put on a song and suggest he listen to it, my kid will literally scream and cry like I'm torturing him, but if it happens to be on the radio while driving then suddenly it's fine and he'll love it. I think part of the reason is that everything is on demand these days, unlike when we grew up on broadcast tv and radio.
I remember feeling vaguely threatened by interests that I didn't understand growing up. At one point for instance, my friend was really into anime, and I felt like it's too weird, like you'd need to be a very different kind of person to enjoy that kind of thing. Years later I decided to try it though, and still I have a bit of an aversion to a lot of the tropes of most anime, but there are also quite a few gems in there that I would've missed. I'm reminded of this often because it's common that people just have a blanket "I don't watch cartoons" attitude. I try to remember this when I have an aversion to some kind of music, literature, movie or hobby.