Meta, the company that owns Facebook, is having a good day today because its sales and user activity for the last quarter of its fiscal year (2022) were better than expected. But the company needs to make money from its VR business. The company is losing billions of dollars because of it.
Meta’s stock is going up in after-hours trading today because it reported pretty good financial results for the fourth quarter. However, its VR division, Reality Labs, didn’t have such good news because it’s still losing money at a shocking rate. Today, the company confirmed that VR and metaverse development cost them more than $4 billion in the last quarter of 2022. And in 2022, it lost more than $13 billion trying (and failing) to build a metaverse that people would want to visit.
Meta, on the other hand, made $32.1 billion across all of its departments and apps.
Decrypt. Co says that Meta’s Reality Labs only made $727 million in the last few months of 2022. Compared to the billions of dollars spent on the division in the same year, that could be better, but it’s worse than you might think. This is 17% less than what the division made during the same time in 2021. Ouch.
Remember that Facebook’s leading metaverse software, Horizon Worlds, has been a huge failure. Most of the worlds inside of it are empty or barely played, according to reports. Not only that, but the company’s employees need to use it more. A leaked internal memo shows that Meta employees don’t like using Horizons Worlds because it has bugs and other quality problems.
The Oculus Quest 2 headset is Reality Labs’ only big success. Many people saw it as a cheaper alternative to expensive PC and console VR headsets, and it could be used on its own. But in July, Meta raised the price of that cheap headset by $100, so the 128GB model now costs $400, and the 256GB model now costs $500.
Meta fired 11,000 people in November 2022. They said the “macroeconomic downturn, increased competition, and ads signal loss.” Zuckerberg said he was to blame for the layoffs, but he didn’t say how much money the company was still spending on VR and metaverse development when he announced the layoffs. The company has spent tens of billions of dollars over the past few years trying to make a VR-powered metaverse a reality.
And now, in February 2023, after laying off many people and continuing to lose money, it only has a copy of PlayStation Home that doesn’t look very good and does little.
The post Facebook’s VR Division Suffers $13.72 Billion Loss in 2022 appeared first on Asume Tech.
from Technology - Asume Tech https://asumetech.com/facebooks-vr-division-suffers-13-72-billion-loss-in-2022/
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