Facebook’s parent company Meta made a lot of money in the last financial quarter. However, its virtual reality and augmented reality division, Reality Labs, lost over $3 billion. That means the Metaverse-focused division has been losing $1 billion per month since June 2022, and Meta expects to continue losing billions to VR.
As reported by MSNBCIn its first-quarter earnings report released Wednesday, Meta said Reality Labs lost $3.85 billion. This is the division of Meta responsible for developing the popular Quest 2 VR gaming headset and the less popular and more expensive Quest 3. She also works on Metaverse projects and helps create them the coldest and most boring digital world
Since Meta began reporting Reality Labs’ losses separately in 2020, the division has never been profitable. With just one exception, Reality Labs Meta has cost $2 billion in every quarter since 2020. In fact, it has been around since June 2022 Meta was losing about a billion dollars every month Development, marketing and sale of VR and AR products. When you add it all up, Meta lost over $45 billion trying to make VR a thing.
In a press release In announcing its financial report for the first quarter of 2024, Meta made it clear that the company not only expects to continue to lose money on VR, but that these losses will increase, saying: “We continue to expect operating losses “will increase significantly compared to last year due to our ongoing product development efforts and our investments to further scale our ecosystem.”
With all the money being spent on virtual reality, you would expect to look around and see everyone wearing VR headsets, jumping into the metaverse and working in it. [Looks around]. No. VR sales are declining among consumersCompanies don’t invest in them VR workplace future that meta has been pushed, and even Apple is expensive The AR headset appears to be failing
We can spend hours explaining various reasons why VR hasn’t caught on, even after one of the world’s largest companies invested over $40 billion in VR, but there’s a simpler answer: people don’t want VR.
Sure, maybe some People like it. Heck, I own a headset and have enjoyed it from time to time. But it’s clear that VR and the metaverse just aren’t a thing that the average person doing a busy job and trying to keep food on the table gives a shit about. Even Meta and other technology companies know this and therefore turn to AI later The metaverse crashed and burned. But Zuckerberg has a lot of money to burn and seems more than willing to keep throwing it into the virtual reality fire. Maybe we’ll get another affordable headset from Meta before it gives up on VR. One can hope.
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