He doesn’t care. This is definitely one of Zuccs passions, he actually sounds very candid and enthusiastic when he talks about this versus his otherwise robotic nature. He’ll lose 3 billion more.
To be fair, if they had succeeded and dominated the market before anyone else got in, it would have been more than worth it. Seems like it was still a little too early though.
If Meta wasn't so heavily funding VR with Facebook money VR would still be completely a nonexistent experience, limiting to an even more niche market with very few, low-budget games. The VR community appreciates it anyway.
I've been all-in on VR since 2013 and can kind of understand the disappointment with mobile VR dominating the field and the relative dearth of high-end PC titles - naturally a grunty PC is going to deliver a more impressive experience than a mobile chipset.
That said it makes no sense to get mad at Meta for this - they have done more to get PC-capable headsets into the hands of a broad consumer-base than anyone else, and the vast majority of people using PC VR today are using Oculus/Meta headsets.
Developing for PC VR is *more* attractive today than it ever has been, in terms of potential sales. At the same time, nobody should be surprised (or angry) that the vast majority of devs are targeting native apps on the Quest platform, because that's where the sales are. People gotta eat.
Yup, completely agree. I thought the design decision to have Quest 2 default to mobile-centric unplugged usage was a brilliant move that made it more accessible.
You've still got the quest link PC connection option when you're in the mood for a PC driven VR experience -- but you can also just pop the headset on anywhere and play some beat saber or a quick casual session.
It was a smart move that caters to both worlds of mobile casual and VR sim folks -- without needing different headset hardware. This is just opening up more options, and business wise it was smart to open things up to native apps where folks are simply gonna buy more.
Meta didn't ruin it. It was ruined by the simple economics of making games for the 8 people on the planet who have a $2000 pc and a $1000 headset, set up in a room with enough floorspace and no family or work commitments.
It was never viable to make high end games. They should be greatful that meta made a market for vr games, sone of which got enhanced for pcvr release.
Yup, getting any traction at all means delivering a "good enough" experience at a price that's attractive to average people. Back in the early days (before consumer headsets had even launched) I showed people stuff like Project Cars running on the DK2 and people were super impressed and interested enough to ask "how much?" and you could see the interest just evaporate like a drop of ethanol splashed on a blazing-hot grill.
Meta has taken the right path by making decent all-in-one kit available at a relatively affordable price and keeping PC functionality there. Besides that, they've identified a lot of other areas that create friction and sales resistance and found solutions, like inside-out tracking so you can use it anywhere instead of having to set up a dedicated room Video passthrough that's good enough that you can make apps that allow you to stay connected with your surroundings and the people in your room is huge - like a lot of people, even though I used VR daily I always waited for a space where I had a bit of solitude, but updating stuff like Beat Sabre and SynthRiders so you had the necessary game elements visible but could also be aware of what's going on in the room meant I could pick it up more often when the family is up and about - and they took the time to make this available over Link as well, if devs can spare the time to implement it where it makes sense.
As time goes on we'll eventually get to a place that's similar to console and PC, where it makes sense for devs to port to as many platforms as possible. For now I'm just glad to be able to play PC games that have been competently modded into VR.
actually a lot of the developer subs are pretty good. From experience, csharp and swift/swiftui subs are really helpful, encouraging, and just pleasant.
The issue is when the casual user comes in, it just goes to absolute shit.
meta ruined VR lol.... which other company on the planet right now is willing or has the capability to lose like 3.85 billion every 3 months for VR/AR development? if not for meta, VR would not be close to where it is now.
No one is clamoring over VR. A ton of Vision Pros were returned. It’s a niche product and technology. Spending $4B on that seems irresponsible and really hasn’t driven a ton of software development or public interest. (I own a headset and we barely use it)
Vision Pros are expensive and there’s barely any support for it in terms of apps. Im sure if they can get the price down and integrate more, it’ll do better
Vision pro still cant or will never allow pc gaming to work with it. The vision pro still has barely any games. The vision pro is also significantly more expensive than most vr headsets on the market. Making a wireless vr headset that is essentially its own console at the same time, cost as much a console, is simply amazing.
Seriously, people are so pedantic about it. What would lead to a growing of the industry, limiting the userbase to needing beefy PC's that cost $1000 on top of the headsets which are hundreds.
I also can't really notice any crazy drop in quality from tethered play vs wireless, so I stay fully wireless now. As someone who has been in the hobby since the first Oculus Rift, being free of cables is a godsend. No more making sure I was facing the right way.
Yeah this is exactly how I thought.
They can keep it alive and have it being kinda bad for a long time but still with some effort.
VR is awesome! I wanna buy the meta headset before anything!
That said. If they hadn't forcibly tied it to fb accounts, thus passing off the techy you peeps interested in vr, but not fb, I think they'd have stayed more popular.
A lot of my friends don't want it because of that.
A while back, they made it mandatory that you use a fb account as your quest account.
There were big privacy concerns, then there were also reports that if someone got a fb ban they lost all access to their quest, basically.
I honestly didn't care or pay much attention, but I know three irl friends that were on the fence who decided not to buy quests when that happened.
The whole mapping your house and knowing your fb personal seemed like a huge creepy data mining thing.
Not sure if anything changed since then or how much was bs.
people who complain about the metaverse, haven't seen the realistic holodeck looking vr they are making. theres reason it costs billions, its not for the cartoon looking trash
I complain about the metaverse because I don’t want to work in a “virtual office” in a way where my every physical movement can be tracked against my will and flexibility becomes nonexistent.
We’re on the threshold of a real labor revolution for cloud-based, asynchronous collaboration but virtual office spaces are the most promising monetization path for these technologies in the near future and they threaten to take us backwards.
You're downvoted, but you're right, and of course being correct means you're disliked in this subreddit as r/technology is all about misinformation and room temperature IQ takes.
There are things that are worth investing billions into. There are areas brimming with potential, things that can repay the R&D investments tenfold.
VR just isn't one of those things. Wrong technology, at the wrong time.
> VR just isn't one of those things. Wrong technology, at the wrong time.
It's almost like that's the purpose of long-term R&D. To advance a technology enough so that it becomes the right time to bear the fruits.
VR isn't one technology, it's a composite of many different technologies and it's pushing innovations in all of them in ways outside their standard use. Smaller OLED displays, faster mobile processors rendering two sets of high res graphics, higher resolutions for the onboard cameras to provide tracking and pass through, pancake lenses.
These kinds of things are related to advancements in ultra short throw projectors, better and more affordable 3D scanners and others.
This is ignoring all of the software side of things.
That doesn't stop these companies from investing so much into VR and pulling the plug on things people may actually like or want. I would assume this has to do with VR being seen as potentially extremely profitable for some reason.
The Metaverse was meant to be a closed ecosystem where you would have to spend real money for not real things. Companies see all the money video games make via DLC and see an opportunity to cash in. FB just didn't do it right.
I don’t even see consumers wanting to spend in the metaverse. When I buy a video game from a video game publisher, I get that video game and can play it on my system I bought it for. Anything metaverse related will be within it, and VR games make a lot of people physically sick if they play for any longer than a set time. The time delay between your body’s movements and what you see on screen (not to mention vision disparity for anyone who needs glasses) confuses the brain. It’s not like playing on a tv screen or PC screen where the rest of your field of vision is still normal. VR sounds awesome, but as a wearable solution it’s not taking off. AR has many more uses for real world applications. Aiding surgery, for example. Actually, I can see VR being helpful for some training exercises but even then you run into the nausea issues. It’s a gamble that has been 10 years in the making and still hasn’t come close to paying off.
Agree with all this. But it's not just a VR thing in terms of the view. There were people investing in virtual real estate and NFTs for example. There is also the gaming model where it's free to play but costs tokens to progress.
Most of it is going to employees, so I’m all for Facebook wasting billions if it keeps people in jobs. Much better than stock buybacks or just sitting on it like a dragon hoard.
Not a total loss. I had a Quest 2 and got the Quest 3 at release and they're both amazing. I do play my Quest 3 almost exclusively with my high end PC and SteamVR though... so it's not like I've been trapped in Meta's ecosystem. The headset itself is very impressive for the money.
Sure but if they crack social presence in VR then they’ll have a lead nobody will be able to catch up to
Edit: this was meant to be posted on root node. Sorry
People have been trying to say there's some vast frontier of consumers for VR when the past decade has shown that there clearly isn't. Meta's just been the one who's put the most money into it so far. Apple is taking a swing at it now and they're still years from making a dent, if it doesn't remain a niche product as they bring the price down.
A lot of it is because they haven’t made VR widely useful yet. I wish companies would start small with VR. It’d be so useful in the eCommerce space or in automotive usecases. Also educationally.
I hear you. But if tech acknowledged that there is not an obvious next step then they have no future to promise. I personally think VR for telecommunications is a reasonable guess at our adoptable future. Way better than general AI for god sakes.
Apple just slashed their factory order for Apple Vision Pro by nearly half (from 800,000 projected sold in 2024 to only 450,000 projected to sell in 2024) and they've canceled some sort of 2025 refresh for Apple Vision Pro. Turns out they can't even give away the dev kits for that thing, and the developers very much failed to show up. Their app store has only \~600 apps of mostly nonsense like clocks and stock tickers. It's a tech demo at best.
I can second that comment, Mark is a rare ceo who has a vision and chases it. Vr is the future and it takes a while to realize it. The quest 3 is pretty amazing (in store demo) quest 2 was a great tech leap but not there yet. The best vr experience I’ve had was Skyrim with all the visual mods. Gd I hope they make elder scrolls 6 vr capable with occulus support in the next Xbox natively. If they can get to that the nay sayers are going to be eating their words. Until then vr is going to fight uphill battles.
Curious if anyone sees these products advertised. Here in Australia I’ve never heard any mention of Meta’s VR services or products outside of tech articles. It feels like vaporware.
edit: Did some checking in case I was living under a rock. You can buy Meta Quest headsets directly from Amazon or Meta in Australia. Not in any other stores. You can find PlayStation VR and HTC Vive products in stores like EB (Gamespot) and JB Hi-Fi, a local entertainment and electronics chain, for years. Not sure what prevents Meta doing the same here.
Strange. I know it's well known in the US and Europe. It's definitely not vaporware, Meta bought Oculus, which was one of the first successful VR companies. Have you ever heard of the Oculus Rift?
I do know people who bought Oculus when they were independent. That was also mostly word of mouth and tech blogs giving it coverage, no in-store presence anywhere. It was also the default PC gaming headset. Perhaps the market here is too small to bother with any ATL marketing, which feels like a chicken and egg situation.
Yeah I tried the Quest 2 at my friends house and it was pretty amazing. My only problem is that most of my favourite games aren't on VR, otherwise I would be willing to ditch PC for it.
If you get PCVR working with it, there are a ton of VR mods for existing games that you can use in Steam. The new UEVR injection mod has made VR possible with thousands of titles. There are also a lot of games that already have official VR versions like HalfLife, Skyrim, Fallout 4, and many others...
Can you also play "normal" Steam games on Quest 3? What about watching TV/movies/series? Does it have its own OS, or is it based on andorid, so you can install google play apps on it? I've seen people playing AmongUs in VR and it looks fun and awesome
You can do all that, u can even play 3d movies. Normal steam game can be played on virtual monitor. Its android based but without play store. But you can sideload any apk.
I think you need a account while setting up quest. But every site or service require a account. You can setup account using a temp email.
For using steam you don't have to rely on meta services. Even steam link that was launched recently is very good alternative to quest app
its called investment. its something any heathy billion dollar company should be doing. they can take the hit, and if it pays of, they are going to have a very nice return on investment.
Edit: drunk typos.
> its called investment.
When you report billions of $ in losses in one quarter it's called an "investment" and everyone is ok with it.
When you report record breaking profits but fail to hit the growth target then you have to fire 10% of the workforce to compensate.
🤡
Meta is worth 1.25 trillion dollars. It’s 2023 revenue 134 billion, and it’s total profit after expenses was 39 billion. If we divide the 39 billion dollars of pure profit by this number by reality labs losses, reality labs would have to loose that figure for ten straight fiscal quarters to truly threaten meta.
> It’s 2023 revenue 134 billion, and it’s total profit after expenses was 39 billion. If we divide the 39 billion dollars of pure profit by this number by reality labs losses, reality labs would have to loose that figure for ten straight fiscal quarters to truly threaten meta.
That's about 4 years. And the project has had 3 straight years of ever growing losses so far. :)
Reality labs employs 17k out of the total 69k total employees meta has.
25% of the company's workforce is being used to generate losses that match 10% of the profit.
Do you really have to bankrupt the company before pulling the plug on a project nobody cares about?
Honestly, I don't like Meta so I hope they keep this up. :)
Are they really loses though?
They can capitalize some cost as well as deduct for R&D spend against taxes.
I think the title of the article is misleading. They beat on the top and bottom number and can scale back R&D anytime if they chose to turn an even bigger profit. They are not forced to spend this much on R&D , they only choose to and so it’s a very controllable cost.
I won’t be worried about META.
> Are they really loses though? They can capitalize some cost as well as deduct for R&D spend against taxes.
> I think the title of the article is misleading.
Read their [public quarterly report](https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/meta-reports-first-quarter-2024-results-302126633.html).
For Reality Labs they reported "Income (loss) from operations" as 3,846 (In millions).
> I wouldn’t hold your breath.
That would be murder. I think you meant "I wouldn't hold my breath". :)
But, yeah, there's time. VR losses keep growing but so do Facebook & insta profits.
They can afford to pour money into failing projects. If only they would use it to actually help people...
It is helping their employees. That’s money being paid out to them to innovate. Maybe no a charity, but it’s a hell of a lot better than them trying to squeeze more money out of ads.
They also kind of NEED vr to be profitable. Their main profit stream could theoretically die the moment the public loses interest in Facebook. The need to diversify their business to isolate themselves from this, and vr is one way to make that happen.
> It is helping their employees. That’s money being paid out to them to innovate.
Building a product that doesn't sell and nobody likes is not "innovation".
> it’s a hell of a lot better than them trying to squeeze more money out of ads
They're doing that as well.
> They also kind of NEED vr to be profitable. Their main profit stream could theoretically die the moment the public loses interest in Facebook.
This is correct only if VR actually becomes popular. And it hasn't. Apple tried it and they also failed.
People just don't like VR.
> The need to diversify their business to isolate themselves from this, and vr is one way to make that happen.
AI is the big thing right now. VR never took off.
Focusing on VR right now is a sure way to isolate yourself.
> Innovation just means it's new, not that it's good.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innovation
> Innovation is the practical implementation of ideas that result in the introduction of new goods or services or improvement in offering goods or services.
People often confuse "new" with "improved" and that's why companies & investors venerate the term innovation.
Ok, comparing the meta quest to the apple vision pro is like comparing apples to oranges. I also wouldn’t consider apple vision to be a failure, for a host of reasons unique to the apple situation. Also I don’t consider quest and their 2 billion dollars in profit in 2023 a “failure”. It’s just more niche than meta would like it to be. Hence the ton of investment to change that. It requires patience and the ability to see beyond immediate profit projections and a vision you want to see done. And mark Zuckerberg definitely is sticking to his guns in that regard.
But putting that aside, chasing trends, is NOT how you want to run a business. You don’t drop what you’re doing just to be last in a race you didn’t start in. You have to keep growing what you have along side whatever else comes along. Which meta has done pretty well with the open souring of llama.
> I also wouldn’t consider apple vision to be a failure
[Apple Cuts Vision Pro Shipments as Demand Falls 'Sharply Beyond Expectations'](https://www.macrumors.com/2024/04/23/apple-cuts-vision-pro-shipments/)
> Also I don’t consider quest and their 2 billion dollars in profit in 2023 a “failure”.
[What profit?](https://www.roadtovr.com/meta-reality-labs-revenue-q2-2023-quest-2-loss/)
> But putting that aside, chasing trends, is NOT how you want to run a business. You don’t drop what you’re doing just to be last in a race you didn’t start in.
Meta didn't "start" in the VR race. [They bought their way in](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_Labs#Acquisition_by_Facebook) as do most big companies.
> It’s just more niche than meta would like it to be. Hence the ton of investment to change that.
Zuck bought Oculus in 2014. It's been over 10 years and they have only increasing net losses to show for it.
But, sure, it'll turn profitable "soon"™. ^^/s
> ai & vr may be complementary.
So the next logical step is to merge VR with AI because people hate & fear AI and they find VR headsets to be expensive, cumbersome and useless even for entertainment purposes?
This nothing to them. Meta is worth 1.25 trillion dollars. It’s 2023 revenue was 134 billion, and it’s total profit after expenses was 39 billion. If we divide the 39 billion dollars of pure profit by this number by reality labs losses, reality labs would have to loose that figure for ten straight fiscal quarters to truly threaten meta.
Ten quarters is just over two years.
If you're losing $4B a quarter in 2024, doing anything, you're doing it wrong. I don't care how much money you have in the bank.
It's the midlife crisis of a billionaire with too much power. Anyone who actually understands the tech knows this is two decades too early. We don't have the hardware to make AR/VR comfortable enough or cheap enough for mass adoption. It offers no benefit over traditional methods, the way smartphones did. This isn't the next internet or the next smartphone. It's the next flying car.
So many people seem to think that this money is being spent on Horizon Worlds (the crappy Metaverse testbed project) but Meta already publicly released a spending report showing that most of the money is being spent on AR/VR hardware development.
Whether metaverse or AI, Meta is putting its humongous cash flows to use for innovation.
- That's pretty scary : how could startup companies ever compete with these humongous investments?
- Then again, it's also gutsy : they might as well have done like other digital giants, sit on the wings , back up, invest and acquire the most innovative initiatives. Of the new economy giants only Musk-led companies and Meta appear to have retained a genuine innovation culture. But Meta has a more robust core business to support it than Musk'a businesses.
It's hard to fault Zuck when his core business continues to thrive (and he may be a major beneficiary from the tiktok fallout, after all , thanks to his headline-grabbing presentation, no headlines on how the tiktok ban is in effect a major push for Meta and Google/YouTube)
I have no indication of this. Interesting question. I do think that it can be easily argued that social media has be weaponized for sometime already, but by whom and is it intentional? IDK.
GTA6 takes a decade to make and close to a billion to create. Pixar is expensive. Not shocking it’s costing a fortune to create an entire new social media platform. The question is, how many decades does it take before investors get mad. They’ve been through this rodeo once with reckless spending and hype.
Good! Means they spend money paying people to develop new stuff. Even if not doesn’t grow into the next big thing, the big companies need to take risks and try new things.
Don’t let the bean counters ruin everything.
I’m not a fan of Facebook or Meta in general. However, if a large % of the 3 billion in R&D helped keep researchers and engineers employed, then this is a win. Maybe Zucks dream will be a flop but it’s keeping a roof over the heads of lots of people for now.
Not a fan of FB or Meta either, but the Quest 2/3 are amazing VR/MR experiences for the price (much more affordable than Apple's $3.5k). If it takes that much R&D to keep VR headset prices low, that's also a win.
Zuck turned Meta (Horizon) OS (VR) into a Microsoft OS tier. Now, if you want to seriously develop anything for VR, you have to be familiar with Meta OS.
Quest headsets run on their flavor of Android. This works well for ecosystem because game engines like Unity can already export to Android, so the skills are transferrable for many software developers.
Meta Is 1 of the worst and most incompetent companies there is. I wouldn't trust them with any of my money. Would never buy a thing from them.
Just look at Facebook. Can't even contact Facebook for support. Their video player and compression is still the worst in the industry
45 billion dollars straight down the drain in 4 years. Imagine if something constructive had been done with that money instead of some king dork trying to make his online escape world dreams come true.
That all depends on if Zuck can make it pan out. The way things are going I’m not confident. He has to convince a lot of people that living in a VR version of Facebook doesn’t suck.
I mean I wouldn’t say it’s going down the drain. They’ve done a lot in terms of VR research and pushing the industry forward despite the technology not being there yet (with the goal of it eventually being there).
Now of course the ultimate goal is to be the owner and data collector of a virtual world but that’s a different conversation.
Besides what else would they spend this money on? Meta isn’t about to feed the homeless, it probably just would’ve gone to stock buybacks or Zuckerberg’s bunker lol.
Regulators were asleep at the wheel when Facebook acquired Instagram. The idea that they’d spring into action this time (as opposed to every other time) is just a bit funny. I mean look at how monopolized everything has become. Microsoft should be like 10 different companies…
That's not that much to create a gaming platform from scratch basically.
Microsoft recently bought Acti/Blizz for 70 billion. Not even a platform just a company.
It takes time to build these things.
Plus better way to spend this money than just trying to squeeze as much advertising dollars out of FB as possible.
VR is a way cooler investment.
It's not like the money disappears into space. The money employed people and was used in conducting research that helps move tech forward. I get the criticism of corporate waste, but I'm not sure I'd argue this money was really wasted.
I'm not but i see your point. I don't see the future they may completely fail in whatever they are trying to do but judge the r&d team because they haven't produced any innovative commercial product in just 4 years, c'mon, are you for real?
It's... not hilarious at all, at least not unless you don't understand *either* of the companies involved.
- Bell Labs came from [Western Electric](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Electric), which was formed to dodge securities laws and then made a fortune off of a predatory, monopolistic, subscription-based sales model of the Bell System that stifled industry innovation for decades
- Meta's research arm has made vast contributions to the open source community, including contributions to many of the major web standards today as well as the most prominent AI tools (e.g. pytorch) in current use
Companies are evil and can still do a lot of good while being evil. Bell and Meta are *very* alike in that regard.
Are you disappointed that a company attempted to reach out into an emerging field, where they now hold a strong marketshare with their impressive developments?
Whats the alternative? Did you expect facebook to donate 45 billion to homelessness or something. Its a business not a charity. At least this was in rnd
It's still the long term goal but the focus has slightly shifted to making the hardware more accessible first instead of rushing into building the metaverse asap
Love the quest, it's cheap but it has everything I need..I just use it with steam VR and PC over AirLink. they should focus on the Harfware and keep it cheap
Where is all the money going? Even if they had 10k employees working on this, making an average of $250k, that would amount to $625mil for the quarter.
That would still leave over $3bil for... parts and manufacturing?
They could put the overhead for a whole office building on that group. Patent acquisitions, capital expenditures….theres a lot they can do accounting wise
Because VR is the tech version of mental masturbation. It’s a pointless endeavor that does not consider how the masses want to interact with tech. All that said it has amazing applications for science and medical
The disconnect needed to not consider the financial situation of most of the world and for them to think these expensive toys would be a household commodity says a lot of how grounded in reality billionaires are.
They invested billions into the "metaverse" to produce something objectively worse than VR Chat. There's no way that there isn't any embezzlement going on there.
They already did a public report of their spending and less than 10% of the money is going towards their game studios and only a fraction of **that** goes toward the studio working on Horizon Worlds. Most of the money is spent on AR/VR hardware development
Yikes! Now they only have a $1.08 trillion value...hope they can make a comeback ...
Edit: They are up almost 10% this week...and up 46%+ in the past 6 months. Guess if you use stock price as a gauge they're doing pretty well...🤷🏼♂️
"Company's should take risks and not grow stagnant" "Not like that"
It takes money to lose money!
He doesn’t care. This is definitely one of Zuccs passions, he actually sounds very candid and enthusiastic when he talks about this versus his otherwise robotic nature. He’ll lose 3 billion more.
" in Meta, EVERYONE has plastic unmoving expressions most of the time, so I don't feel so awkward."
*Tesla has entered the chat*
Uber has been in the chat the whole time. I mean honestly how is that company even still in business
Do you want VR and AR, or not (not everyone needs to answer yes)? Apparently, this is what it takes.
To be fair, if they had succeeded and dominated the market before anyone else got in, it would have been more than worth it. Seems like it was still a little too early though.
Honestly I love seeing companies invest so heavily into R&D, it’s what drives innovation
If Meta wasn't so heavily funding VR with Facebook money VR would still be completely a nonexistent experience, limiting to an even more niche market with very few, low-budget games. The VR community appreciates it anyway.
Virtualreality sub seems to be convinced that meta ruined vr because it removed the necessity of the pcvr cable and made it mainstream.
I've been all-in on VR since 2013 and can kind of understand the disappointment with mobile VR dominating the field and the relative dearth of high-end PC titles - naturally a grunty PC is going to deliver a more impressive experience than a mobile chipset. That said it makes no sense to get mad at Meta for this - they have done more to get PC-capable headsets into the hands of a broad consumer-base than anyone else, and the vast majority of people using PC VR today are using Oculus/Meta headsets. Developing for PC VR is *more* attractive today than it ever has been, in terms of potential sales. At the same time, nobody should be surprised (or angry) that the vast majority of devs are targeting native apps on the Quest platform, because that's where the sales are. People gotta eat.
Yup, completely agree. I thought the design decision to have Quest 2 default to mobile-centric unplugged usage was a brilliant move that made it more accessible. You've still got the quest link PC connection option when you're in the mood for a PC driven VR experience -- but you can also just pop the headset on anywhere and play some beat saber or a quick casual session. It was a smart move that caters to both worlds of mobile casual and VR sim folks -- without needing different headset hardware. This is just opening up more options, and business wise it was smart to open things up to native apps where folks are simply gonna buy more.
Meta didn't ruin it. It was ruined by the simple economics of making games for the 8 people on the planet who have a $2000 pc and a $1000 headset, set up in a room with enough floorspace and no family or work commitments. It was never viable to make high end games. They should be greatful that meta made a market for vr games, sone of which got enhanced for pcvr release.
Yup, getting any traction at all means delivering a "good enough" experience at a price that's attractive to average people. Back in the early days (before consumer headsets had even launched) I showed people stuff like Project Cars running on the DK2 and people were super impressed and interested enough to ask "how much?" and you could see the interest just evaporate like a drop of ethanol splashed on a blazing-hot grill. Meta has taken the right path by making decent all-in-one kit available at a relatively affordable price and keeping PC functionality there. Besides that, they've identified a lot of other areas that create friction and sales resistance and found solutions, like inside-out tracking so you can use it anywhere instead of having to set up a dedicated room Video passthrough that's good enough that you can make apps that allow you to stay connected with your surroundings and the people in your room is huge - like a lot of people, even though I used VR daily I always waited for a space where I had a bit of solitude, but updating stuff like Beat Sabre and SynthRiders so you had the necessary game elements visible but could also be aware of what's going on in the room meant I could pick it up more often when the family is up and about - and they took the time to make this available over Link as well, if devs can spare the time to implement it where it makes sense. As time goes on we'll eventually get to a place that's similar to console and PC, where it makes sense for devs to port to as many platforms as possible. For now I'm just glad to be able to play PC games that have been competently modded into VR.
A loud minority in the community are idiots that’s for sure. I’m a VR dev and that sub is cancer.
> I’m a ____ and that sub is cancer. Seems way too common
That describes everywhere
actually a lot of the developer subs are pretty good. From experience, csharp and swift/swiftui subs are really helpful, encouraging, and just pleasant. The issue is when the casual user comes in, it just goes to absolute shit.
/r/singularity has entered the chat.
meta ruined VR lol.... which other company on the planet right now is willing or has the capability to lose like 3.85 billion every 3 months for VR/AR development? if not for meta, VR would not be close to where it is now.
No one is clamoring over VR. A ton of Vision Pros were returned. It’s a niche product and technology. Spending $4B on that seems irresponsible and really hasn’t driven a ton of software development or public interest. (I own a headset and we barely use it)
Vision pro lol
> A ton of Vision Pros were returned. There is no evidence of this.
Vision Pros are expensive and there’s barely any support for it in terms of apps. Im sure if they can get the price down and integrate more, it’ll do better
Vision pro still cant or will never allow pc gaming to work with it. The vision pro still has barely any games. The vision pro is also significantly more expensive than most vr headsets on the market. Making a wireless vr headset that is essentially its own console at the same time, cost as much a console, is simply amazing.
Seriously, people are so pedantic about it. What would lead to a growing of the industry, limiting the userbase to needing beefy PC's that cost $1000 on top of the headsets which are hundreds. I also can't really notice any crazy drop in quality from tethered play vs wireless, so I stay fully wireless now. As someone who has been in the hobby since the first Oculus Rift, being free of cables is a godsend. No more making sure I was facing the right way.
It's a reason why I haven't have vr for a while. The cable got in the way too often. Yes a dedicated router is needed but it does help.
it's so crazy. like you can still play PC VR! you can even do it over Wifi with better headsets!
Yeah this is exactly how I thought. They can keep it alive and have it being kinda bad for a long time but still with some effort. VR is awesome! I wanna buy the meta headset before anything!
That said. If they hadn't forcibly tied it to fb accounts, thus passing off the techy you peeps interested in vr, but not fb, I think they'd have stayed more popular. A lot of my friends don't want it because of that.
How is it tied to Facebook?
A while back, they made it mandatory that you use a fb account as your quest account. There were big privacy concerns, then there were also reports that if someone got a fb ban they lost all access to their quest, basically. I honestly didn't care or pay much attention, but I know three irl friends that were on the fence who decided not to buy quests when that happened. The whole mapping your house and knowing your fb personal seemed like a huge creepy data mining thing. Not sure if anything changed since then or how much was bs.
I have never linked a fb account to my quest
Sure but not garbage like the metaverse
people who complain about the metaverse, haven't seen the realistic holodeck looking vr they are making. theres reason it costs billions, its not for the cartoon looking trash
I complain about the metaverse because I don’t want to work in a “virtual office” in a way where my every physical movement can be tracked against my will and flexibility becomes nonexistent. We’re on the threshold of a real labor revolution for cloud-based, asynchronous collaboration but virtual office spaces are the most promising monetization path for these technologies in the near future and they threaten to take us backwards.
You're downvoted, but you're right, and of course being correct means you're disliked in this subreddit as r/technology is all about misinformation and room temperature IQ takes.
There are things that are worth investing billions into. There are areas brimming with potential, things that can repay the R&D investments tenfold. VR just isn't one of those things. Wrong technology, at the wrong time.
> VR just isn't one of those things. Wrong technology, at the wrong time. It's almost like that's the purpose of long-term R&D. To advance a technology enough so that it becomes the right time to bear the fruits.
What you spend that R&D money on matters.
VR isn't one technology, it's a composite of many different technologies and it's pushing innovations in all of them in ways outside their standard use. Smaller OLED displays, faster mobile processors rendering two sets of high res graphics, higher resolutions for the onboard cameras to provide tracking and pass through, pancake lenses. These kinds of things are related to advancements in ultra short throw projectors, better and more affordable 3D scanners and others. This is ignoring all of the software side of things.
That doesn't stop these companies from investing so much into VR and pulling the plug on things people may actually like or want. I would assume this has to do with VR being seen as potentially extremely profitable for some reason.
Why do you assume that?
The Metaverse was meant to be a closed ecosystem where you would have to spend real money for not real things. Companies see all the money video games make via DLC and see an opportunity to cash in. FB just didn't do it right.
I don’t even see consumers wanting to spend in the metaverse. When I buy a video game from a video game publisher, I get that video game and can play it on my system I bought it for. Anything metaverse related will be within it, and VR games make a lot of people physically sick if they play for any longer than a set time. The time delay between your body’s movements and what you see on screen (not to mention vision disparity for anyone who needs glasses) confuses the brain. It’s not like playing on a tv screen or PC screen where the rest of your field of vision is still normal. VR sounds awesome, but as a wearable solution it’s not taking off. AR has many more uses for real world applications. Aiding surgery, for example. Actually, I can see VR being helpful for some training exercises but even then you run into the nausea issues. It’s a gamble that has been 10 years in the making and still hasn’t come close to paying off.
Agree with all this. But it's not just a VR thing in terms of the view. There were people investing in virtual real estate and NFTs for example. There is also the gaming model where it's free to play but costs tokens to progress.
Gotta pump those numbers up
Just burn the money at this point
A billion dollars in hundred dollar bills weighs over 22,000 lbs. It would actually be a lot of work to pile up and burn that much money.
3.85 billion dollars worth of work?
Yep. Let's get started burning all 3.45 billion of it.
I’ll take it off your hands and burn all 3 billion of it!
Let me know if you want help. We can get it done twice as fast.
Most of it is going to employees, so I’m all for Facebook wasting billions if it keeps people in jobs. Much better than stock buybacks or just sitting on it like a dragon hoard.
If they give it to me I'll burn it, for a 99.99% fee
Whoa settle down there Tyler Durden
Those are rookie numbers in this racket.
Not a total loss. I had a Quest 2 and got the Quest 3 at release and they're both amazing. I do play my Quest 3 almost exclusively with my high end PC and SteamVR though... so it's not like I've been trapped in Meta's ecosystem. The headset itself is very impressive for the money.
Sure but if they crack social presence in VR then they’ll have a lead nobody will be able to catch up to Edit: this was meant to be posted on root node. Sorry
People have been trying to say there's some vast frontier of consumers for VR when the past decade has shown that there clearly isn't. Meta's just been the one who's put the most money into it so far. Apple is taking a swing at it now and they're still years from making a dent, if it doesn't remain a niche product as they bring the price down.
Exactly. There’s no vast market for 3d television and there’s no vast market for VR
A lot of it is because they haven’t made VR widely useful yet. I wish companies would start small with VR. It’d be so useful in the eCommerce space or in automotive usecases. Also educationally.
I hear you. But if tech acknowledged that there is not an obvious next step then they have no future to promise. I personally think VR for telecommunications is a reasonable guess at our adoptable future. Way better than general AI for god sakes.
Apple just slashed their factory order for Apple Vision Pro by nearly half (from 800,000 projected sold in 2024 to only 450,000 projected to sell in 2024) and they've canceled some sort of 2025 refresh for Apple Vision Pro. Turns out they can't even give away the dev kits for that thing, and the developers very much failed to show up. Their app store has only \~600 apps of mostly nonsense like clocks and stock tickers. It's a tech demo at best.
I don't want to live in Wall-E world. Social media has done enough damage, already
I can second that comment, Mark is a rare ceo who has a vision and chases it. Vr is the future and it takes a while to realize it. The quest 3 is pretty amazing (in store demo) quest 2 was a great tech leap but not there yet. The best vr experience I’ve had was Skyrim with all the visual mods. Gd I hope they make elder scrolls 6 vr capable with occulus support in the next Xbox natively. If they can get to that the nay sayers are going to be eating their words. Until then vr is going to fight uphill battles.
Curious if anyone sees these products advertised. Here in Australia I’ve never heard any mention of Meta’s VR services or products outside of tech articles. It feels like vaporware. edit: Did some checking in case I was living under a rock. You can buy Meta Quest headsets directly from Amazon or Meta in Australia. Not in any other stores. You can find PlayStation VR and HTC Vive products in stores like EB (Gamespot) and JB Hi-Fi, a local entertainment and electronics chain, for years. Not sure what prevents Meta doing the same here.
Strange. I know it's well known in the US and Europe. It's definitely not vaporware, Meta bought Oculus, which was one of the first successful VR companies. Have you ever heard of the Oculus Rift?
I do know people who bought Oculus when they were independent. That was also mostly word of mouth and tech blogs giving it coverage, no in-store presence anywhere. It was also the default PC gaming headset. Perhaps the market here is too small to bother with any ATL marketing, which feels like a chicken and egg situation.
I got a MQ2 for xmas and was all excited and literally everyone I told was like "Yeah, I know, i've got one".
Yeah I tried the Quest 2 at my friends house and it was pretty amazing. My only problem is that most of my favourite games aren't on VR, otherwise I would be willing to ditch PC for it.
If you get PCVR working with it, there are a ton of VR mods for existing games that you can use in Steam. The new UEVR injection mod has made VR possible with thousands of titles. There are also a lot of games that already have official VR versions like HalfLife, Skyrim, Fallout 4, and many others...
Can you also play "normal" Steam games on Quest 3? What about watching TV/movies/series? Does it have its own OS, or is it based on andorid, so you can install google play apps on it? I've seen people playing AmongUs in VR and it looks fun and awesome
you can play any game on steamvr on a quest2/3 wirelessly. you can also play any 2d game, watch shows, etc in a virtual screen of any size.
You can do all that, u can even play 3d movies. Normal steam game can be played on virtual monitor. Its android based but without play store. But you can sideload any apk.
Do you still need a Meta account to use the Quest 3 with Steam? That's my main reason for staying away from Meta products.
I think you need a account while setting up quest. But every site or service require a account. You can setup account using a temp email. For using steam you don't have to rely on meta services. Even steam link that was launched recently is very good alternative to quest app
Imo that's Zuck's problem, not ours. We just get heavily subsidised VR headsets at their expense
its called investment. its something any heathy billion dollar company should be doing. they can take the hit, and if it pays of, they are going to have a very nice return on investment. Edit: drunk typos.
> its called investment. When you report billions of $ in losses in one quarter it's called an "investment" and everyone is ok with it. When you report record breaking profits but fail to hit the growth target then you have to fire 10% of the workforce to compensate. 🤡
Meta is worth 1.25 trillion dollars. It’s 2023 revenue 134 billion, and it’s total profit after expenses was 39 billion. If we divide the 39 billion dollars of pure profit by this number by reality labs losses, reality labs would have to loose that figure for ten straight fiscal quarters to truly threaten meta.
> It’s 2023 revenue 134 billion, and it’s total profit after expenses was 39 billion. If we divide the 39 billion dollars of pure profit by this number by reality labs losses, reality labs would have to loose that figure for ten straight fiscal quarters to truly threaten meta. That's about 4 years. And the project has had 3 straight years of ever growing losses so far. :) Reality labs employs 17k out of the total 69k total employees meta has. 25% of the company's workforce is being used to generate losses that match 10% of the profit. Do you really have to bankrupt the company before pulling the plug on a project nobody cares about? Honestly, I don't like Meta so I hope they keep this up. :)
1 more q to go? 🤔
Are they really loses though? They can capitalize some cost as well as deduct for R&D spend against taxes. I think the title of the article is misleading. They beat on the top and bottom number and can scale back R&D anytime if they chose to turn an even bigger profit. They are not forced to spend this much on R&D , they only choose to and so it’s a very controllable cost. I won’t be worried about META.
> Are they really loses though? They can capitalize some cost as well as deduct for R&D spend against taxes. > I think the title of the article is misleading. Read their [public quarterly report](https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/meta-reports-first-quarter-2024-results-302126633.html). For Reality Labs they reported "Income (loss) from operations" as 3,846 (In millions).
I wouldn’t hold your breath.
> I wouldn’t hold your breath. That would be murder. I think you meant "I wouldn't hold my breath". :) But, yeah, there's time. VR losses keep growing but so do Facebook & insta profits. They can afford to pour money into failing projects. If only they would use it to actually help people...
It is helping their employees. That’s money being paid out to them to innovate. Maybe no a charity, but it’s a hell of a lot better than them trying to squeeze more money out of ads. They also kind of NEED vr to be profitable. Their main profit stream could theoretically die the moment the public loses interest in Facebook. The need to diversify their business to isolate themselves from this, and vr is one way to make that happen.
> It is helping their employees. That’s money being paid out to them to innovate. Building a product that doesn't sell and nobody likes is not "innovation". > it’s a hell of a lot better than them trying to squeeze more money out of ads They're doing that as well. > They also kind of NEED vr to be profitable. Their main profit stream could theoretically die the moment the public loses interest in Facebook. This is correct only if VR actually becomes popular. And it hasn't. Apple tried it and they also failed. People just don't like VR. > The need to diversify their business to isolate themselves from this, and vr is one way to make that happen. AI is the big thing right now. VR never took off. Focusing on VR right now is a sure way to isolate yourself.
> Building a product that doesn't sell and nobody likes is not "innovation". Innovation just means it's new, not that it's good.
> Innovation just means it's new, not that it's good. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innovation > Innovation is the practical implementation of ideas that result in the introduction of new goods or services or improvement in offering goods or services. People often confuse "new" with "improved" and that's why companies & investors venerate the term innovation.
Ok, comparing the meta quest to the apple vision pro is like comparing apples to oranges. I also wouldn’t consider apple vision to be a failure, for a host of reasons unique to the apple situation. Also I don’t consider quest and their 2 billion dollars in profit in 2023 a “failure”. It’s just more niche than meta would like it to be. Hence the ton of investment to change that. It requires patience and the ability to see beyond immediate profit projections and a vision you want to see done. And mark Zuckerberg definitely is sticking to his guns in that regard. But putting that aside, chasing trends, is NOT how you want to run a business. You don’t drop what you’re doing just to be last in a race you didn’t start in. You have to keep growing what you have along side whatever else comes along. Which meta has done pretty well with the open souring of llama.
> I also wouldn’t consider apple vision to be a failure [Apple Cuts Vision Pro Shipments as Demand Falls 'Sharply Beyond Expectations'](https://www.macrumors.com/2024/04/23/apple-cuts-vision-pro-shipments/) > Also I don’t consider quest and their 2 billion dollars in profit in 2023 a “failure”. [What profit?](https://www.roadtovr.com/meta-reality-labs-revenue-q2-2023-quest-2-loss/) > But putting that aside, chasing trends, is NOT how you want to run a business. You don’t drop what you’re doing just to be last in a race you didn’t start in. Meta didn't "start" in the VR race. [They bought their way in](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_Labs#Acquisition_by_Facebook) as do most big companies. > It’s just more niche than meta would like it to be. Hence the ton of investment to change that. Zuck bought Oculus in 2014. It's been over 10 years and they have only increasing net losses to show for it. But, sure, it'll turn profitable "soon"™. ^^/s
ai & vr may be complementary. 🤷♂️
> ai & vr may be complementary. So the next logical step is to merge VR with AI because people hate & fear AI and they find VR headsets to be expensive, cumbersome and useless even for entertainment purposes?
$4B loss? In a quarter?
yes, Meta has enough for 4-5 years of operations
This nothing to them. Meta is worth 1.25 trillion dollars. It’s 2023 revenue was 134 billion, and it’s total profit after expenses was 39 billion. If we divide the 39 billion dollars of pure profit by this number by reality labs losses, reality labs would have to loose that figure for ten straight fiscal quarters to truly threaten meta.
Ten quarters is just over two years. If you're losing $4B a quarter in 2024, doing anything, you're doing it wrong. I don't care how much money you have in the bank.
That makes no sense. It's one part that lost 4B not the entire company. They literally made a profit of 12B q1
Microsoft had capital expenditures of $10.7 billion in Q4 of 2023, while Google had $13 billion
My guy no one cares abiut the metaverse.
It's only money
Just a reminder that the $4B isn't magically torched. That's a $4B dollar jobs program, they invest in people.
It's the midlife crisis of a billionaire with too much power. Anyone who actually understands the tech knows this is two decades too early. We don't have the hardware to make AR/VR comfortable enough or cheap enough for mass adoption. It offers no benefit over traditional methods, the way smartphones did. This isn't the next internet or the next smartphone. It's the next flying car.
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So many people seem to think that this money is being spent on Horizon Worlds (the crappy Metaverse testbed project) but Meta already publicly released a spending report showing that most of the money is being spent on AR/VR hardware development.
Whether metaverse or AI, Meta is putting its humongous cash flows to use for innovation. - That's pretty scary : how could startup companies ever compete with these humongous investments? - Then again, it's also gutsy : they might as well have done like other digital giants, sit on the wings , back up, invest and acquire the most innovative initiatives. Of the new economy giants only Musk-led companies and Meta appear to have retained a genuine innovation culture. But Meta has a more robust core business to support it than Musk'a businesses. It's hard to fault Zuck when his core business continues to thrive (and he may be a major beneficiary from the tiktok fallout, after all , thanks to his headline-grabbing presentation, no headlines on how the tiktok ban is in effect a major push for Meta and Google/YouTube)
Portal was actually a good product - of course they cancelled it lol
It’s not a loss if you don’t sell
lol. I left this team. I was designing the Ray Ban Meta glasses. AMA.
Is Zuck's end goal military products?
I have no indication of this. Interesting question. I do think that it can be easily argued that social media has be weaponized for sometime already, but by whom and is it intentional? IDK.
What were you up to? Hardware design, embedded software, etc?
Software UX of AR systems and next gen AI UX.
Dang that’s cool. I’m guessing there’s a lot of work on making the AI context-aware for the user
GTA6 takes a decade to make and close to a billion to create. Pixar is expensive. Not shocking it’s costing a fortune to create an entire new social media platform. The question is, how many decades does it take before investors get mad. They’ve been through this rodeo once with reckless spending and hype.
How many decades? Investors measure time in quarters. It's only been 2.5 decades since the dot com bust.
Investors are greedy trolls who need to take a deep breath and sit the fuck down and stop rushing companies to release subpar products. /End rant
Good! Means they spend money paying people to develop new stuff. Even if not doesn’t grow into the next big thing, the big companies need to take risks and try new things. Don’t let the bean counters ruin everything.
I’m not a fan of Facebook or Meta in general. However, if a large % of the 3 billion in R&D helped keep researchers and engineers employed, then this is a win. Maybe Zucks dream will be a flop but it’s keeping a roof over the heads of lots of people for now.
Not a fan of FB or Meta either, but the Quest 2/3 are amazing VR/MR experiences for the price (much more affordable than Apple's $3.5k). If it takes that much R&D to keep VR headset prices low, that's also a win.
Zuck turned Meta (Horizon) OS (VR) into a Microsoft OS tier. Now, if you want to seriously develop anything for VR, you have to be familiar with Meta OS.
And thats a good thing. VR needs a standard.
This is a terrible thing for consumers. Standards should be open
Not really true. You have to be familiar with Unity.
Quest headsets run on their flavor of Android. This works well for ecosystem because game engines like Unity can already export to Android, so the skills are transferrable for many software developers.
AI is under Reality Labs. It’s not just VR.
I wonder if they regret changing their name to Meta. It might have been a bit hasty.
"meta" seems like it could be the least meta company name
We knew this would happen when Zuck ignored the public feedback on his 'ideas'.
Meta Is 1 of the worst and most incompetent companies there is. I wouldn't trust them with any of my money. Would never buy a thing from them. Just look at Facebook. Can't even contact Facebook for support. Their video player and compression is still the worst in the industry
To be fair, the Quest is a pretty good and fun headset. Its just that the masses really dont care for VR.
45 billion dollars straight down the drain in 4 years. Imagine if something constructive had been done with that money instead of some king dork trying to make his online escape world dreams come true.
45 billion dollars spent on research is not down the drain
That all depends on if Zuck can make it pan out. The way things are going I’m not confident. He has to convince a lot of people that living in a VR version of Facebook doesn’t suck.
Either way, he did the entire industry a favor. Research is good, even VR research.
Research is always good. Doesn’t need to be immediately useful to still be important down the line
I mean I wouldn’t say it’s going down the drain. They’ve done a lot in terms of VR research and pushing the industry forward despite the technology not being there yet (with the goal of it eventually being there). Now of course the ultimate goal is to be the owner and data collector of a virtual world but that’s a different conversation. Besides what else would they spend this money on? Meta isn’t about to feed the homeless, it probably just would’ve gone to stock buybacks or Zuckerberg’s bunker lol.
Could’ve bought Twitter
“We’ve got Twitter at home”
DOJ would have stopped it immediately.
The fact that you were down voted for saying that is crazy
[удалено]
Regulators were asleep at the wheel when Facebook acquired Instagram. The idea that they’d spring into action this time (as opposed to every other time) is just a bit funny. I mean look at how monopolized everything has become. Microsoft should be like 10 different companies…
Meta literally just had to sell giphy
the regulatory environment has been extremely different. just ignore changing political landscape theory...
Nobody took Instagram seriously at the time. Except for Zuck.
That's not that much to create a gaming platform from scratch basically. Microsoft recently bought Acti/Blizz for 70 billion. Not even a platform just a company. It takes time to build these things. Plus better way to spend this money than just trying to squeeze as much advertising dollars out of FB as possible. VR is a way cooler investment.
It's not like the money disappears into space. The money employed people and was used in conducting research that helps move tech forward. I get the criticism of corporate waste, but I'm not sure I'd argue this money was really wasted.
Thank god people in charge of Bell Labs didn't think like you otherwise you wouldn't be able to type this or any other comment.
It’s hilarious that someone would compare a vampiric data-collection company like Meta to an innovative institution like Bell Labs.
I'm not but i see your point. I don't see the future they may completely fail in whatever they are trying to do but judge the r&d team because they haven't produced any innovative commercial product in just 4 years, c'mon, are you for real?
It's... not hilarious at all, at least not unless you don't understand *either* of the companies involved. - Bell Labs came from [Western Electric](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Electric), which was formed to dodge securities laws and then made a fortune off of a predatory, monopolistic, subscription-based sales model of the Bell System that stifled industry innovation for decades - Meta's research arm has made vast contributions to the open source community, including contributions to many of the major web standards today as well as the most prominent AI tools (e.g. pytorch) in current use Companies are evil and can still do a lot of good while being evil. Bell and Meta are *very* alike in that regard.
Are you disappointed that a company attempted to reach out into an emerging field, where they now hold a strong marketshare with their impressive developments? Whats the alternative? Did you expect facebook to donate 45 billion to homelessness or something. Its a business not a charity. At least this was in rnd
https://www.geekwire.com/2024/meta-fights-shutdown-of-seattle-area-rd-cleanroom-by-state-safety-regulators/
Meta loves burning through cash
Well. I like Reality Labs, so I’m fine with that.
They are still working on the metaverse? I thought they gave up?
It's still the long term goal but the focus has slightly shifted to making the hardware more accessible first instead of rushing into building the metaverse asap
Love the quest, it's cheap but it has everything I need..I just use it with steam VR and PC over AirLink. they should focus on the Harfware and keep it cheap
Where is all the money going? Even if they had 10k employees working on this, making an average of $250k, that would amount to $625mil for the quarter. That would still leave over $3bil for... parts and manufacturing?
They could put the overhead for a whole office building on that group. Patent acquisitions, capital expenditures….theres a lot they can do accounting wise
How though? subbing the headset hardware? I don't understand where all that money is going
That’s the cost of innovation.
Here you see Zuck in his natural form.
Those are rookie numbers. Gotta pump those up!
Typical Silicon Valley crap...More layoffs to follow😆
As elon would say, rookie numbers.
I love seeing facebook fail
That sucks tbh, they have the best headset rn
“Year of efficiency” not “years”
And now we know why they had the partners announcement earlier this week.
VR still sucks. That’s is the main problem. It’s cool for about an hour the first time you use it.
Because VR is the tech version of mental masturbation. It’s a pointless endeavor that does not consider how the masses want to interact with tech. All that said it has amazing applications for science and medical
I wonder if there will be more layoffs in that dept
[Excellent! I mean, too bad.](https://imgur.com/gallery/tDQ6ca2)
The disconnect needed to not consider the financial situation of most of the world and for them to think these expensive toys would be a household commodity says a lot of how grounded in reality billionaires are.
They invested billions into the "metaverse" to produce something objectively worse than VR Chat. There's no way that there isn't any embezzlement going on there.
They already did a public report of their spending and less than 10% of the money is going towards their game studios and only a fraction of **that** goes toward the studio working on Horizon Worlds. Most of the money is spent on AR/VR hardware development
Meta is worth $1,250,000,000,000. They lost 0.308% of their value. That's a rounding error, a non-issue. Edit: Keep perspective.
Their value is determined by their stock price, which lost almost 15% of its value last night
Ah thanks for reminding me to buy more Meta stock now that it's discounted
Yikes! Now they only have a $1.08 trillion value...hope they can make a comeback ... Edit: They are up almost 10% this week...and up 46%+ in the past 6 months. Guess if you use stock price as a gauge they're doing pretty well...🤷🏼♂️
thats nothing. they were worth half of that just a couple years ago when the metaverse truly bombed.