Meta Lacks ‘Expertise’ to Build its Own VR Fitness App: Oculus Point Man

Mark Rabkin, vice president of Meta Reality Labs and the executive who heads Meta’s Oculus Store, doubts Meta has the internal capability to build its own successful virtual reality fitness app if its acquisition of Within Unlimited and its Supernatural VR fitness app falls through, he testified for the defense Friday in U.S. District Court for Northern California in San Jose, in an evidentiary hearing via Zoom on the FTC’s motion for a preliminary injunction to block the transaction.

Meta “can definitely build an application, but I think our chances of success in that new type of space are very, very low,” said Rabkin, third in Meta's VR chain of command from CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth. Making a hit app in a new VR fitness category is “very, very difficult,” he said. “I can hire a drummer and a guitarist, but can I order them to make a hit song? Pretty challenging.”

The chances of success “depend on your experience in the space, your vision in the space,” said Rabkin. “We don’t have people in the company who are fitness experts. The company does not build fitness products.” Social networking and gaming are the top two VR use cases right now, he said. “Those are both in the company’s lifeblood and wheelhouse,” he said.

In fitness, Meta has “never been a player in any way, not in hardware, not in software, so there’s no expertise, no relative competitive advantage,” said Rabkin. “Fundamentally, in such a new space, most startups will fail,” he said. “So I think achieving what Supernatural has achieved is remarkable, and it would be very difficult to replicate that.”

The line of questioning under direct examination from Meta attorney Chantale Fiebig, with Weil Gotshal, was intended to discredit assertions in the FTC’s Oct. 7 amended complaint that instead of choosing to "compete on the merits" by creating its own VR dedicated fitness app, as it can reasonably do, Meta resorted to proposing the "unlawful” Within buy. Meta countered in its Oct. 13 motion to dismiss that courts for decades have rejected the lessening of potential competition arguments like the FTC’s as "inherently speculative."

The court “has heard a lot about the possibility that Meta could use Beat Saber to partner with Peloton” to create a VR fitness app, said Fiebig, questioning Rabkin how seriously the idea was floated inside Meta. “The idea never went anywhere beyond the early discussion phase,” around March 2021, said Rabkin. His reaction to the proposal “was not very positive,” he said. “It was not very bullish.”

No One Ever Asked Peloton

Rabkin was negatively disposed toward a Beat Saber co-branding alliance with Peloton because “partnerships are hard,” he said. “As far as I know, no one ever bothered to ask Peloton about this idea, which is kind of an important part of such a partnership. I just didn’t see that being good for them or us.” We asked Peloton for comment Monday but got no response.

A big negative for Meta was that a VR fitness app was “not what Beat Saber is about,” said Rabkin. “Beat Saber is a rhythm music game, and it is my crown jewel,” he said. It’s “literally the number one most installed app” in the Oculus Store, he said. His first concern when the Beat Saber/Peloton talks “bubbled up” inside Meta was, “I don’t want to mess that up,” he said. “It is so hard to create a massive VR hit.”

On the FTC’s suggestions that Meta could build an entirely separate Beat Saber VR fitness app without modifying the original Beat Saber game, Figbie asked Rabkin if he thought that was a good or a bad idea. “I think it’s a better idea than modifying Beat Saber, but still pretty bad,” he responded. “It’s kind of a Catch-22,” he said. “If you still make it a lot like Beat Saber, it still reflects rather weirdly on the Beat Sabre brand, on the Beat Sabre community. It feels like getting away from their roots. It feels like a change in what it is about.” He described the community for Beat Sabre as “so passionate” about “new dances, new competition, high scores.”

There’s a “narrow path to make something great, and lots of ways to mess it up,” said Rabkin under questioning from U.S. District Judge Edward Davila. If Beat Saber’s founders “were not into the idea” of adapting the franchise for a VR fitness app, “or were forced to do it, they could quit, and that would be astoundingly detrimental to Meta,” he said. “If that new thing is a flop, that could damage the brand of Beat Saber overall.”

Unacceptable 'Tradeoff'

Meta didn’t want to “mess up something that was working so well” in Beat Saber, Rabkin told the judge. Supernatural through acquisition, by comparison, “has a different brand, a different community and no conflict,” he said. “It does not mess up anything existing that is working,” he said. “To risk our crown jewel, our most popular app” with a “low probability” of success, “that tradeoff was not worth it,” he said.

Rabkin acknowledged under cross-examination from FTC attorney Justin Epner that expanding Beat Saber into VR fitness was “a big topic for discussion” inside Meta around March 2021. “Fitness, in general, was a huge topic of discussion,” he said. Fitness is “a very exciting new use case” for VR, he said. “Beat Saber was one of the apps that kept coming up. It was definitely one of the apps where people would get sweaty as they grooved to the music. It was a very, very natural target for ideas.” There was a lot of “buzz” for a period within Meta about adapting Beat Saber for VR fitness, said Rabkin, “but I think that excitement faded at some point.” The idea “just kind of got left to the side and forgotten,” he said.

When Epner asked Rabkin if Meta plans to bring Supernatural to other competitive VR headsets if the Within buy goes through, Rabkin responded: “I do not know that. I have not had those discussions with folks. I will say that we do bring Beat Saber to other platforms.” When asked how Rabkin as vice president-Oculus could not know about Meta's ambitions for Supernatural, Rabkin noted the Meta content team was moved from his direct oversight to the company’s newly formed metaverse organization right about when the terms of the Within buy were closing in August 2021. In the time since, he has been "trying to keep up with stuff, and interested in a lot of that, but it is not in my direct purview” as it was previously, he said.

Asked by Epner if Meta has brought Beat Saber to other platforms since acquiring its owner Beat Games in 2019, Rabkin wasn’t sure of the “sequencing,” he said. “I know that we are in the process of bringing it to PlayStation. I don’t know if that has already concluded. I believe that all that work would have happened since the acquisition.”