Meta’s Reality Labs, the unit tasked with building the futuristic metaverse, continues bleeding money.
The social media company reported its second-quarter earnings on Wednesday and revealed that Reality Labs logged an operating loss of $4.53 billion while recording $370 million in sales during the period. Analysts were projecting that unit to post a second-quarter operating loss of $4.99 billion while generating $381 million in sales.
Meanwhile game studios make profit and still lay off their employees.
Ha ha ha ha what the actual fuck?
Give me 1 single million (a year if you’re generous) and I could build your stupid metaverse.
How can they spend so much money?
Facebook itself prints money, so Meta is perfectly content to just set that money on fire attempting to capture the entire VR market and push out everyone else by operating at an enormous loss indefinitely. This is why, 1000%, nobody should ever buy a Meta VR product no matter how cheap it is. Once they’ve destroyed all competition (assuming they even manage to succeed), anyone wanting to use VR for any purpose will be completely at Meta/Facebook’s mercy. The end goal of this is obviously twofold, one is that Meta wants to have their spy machine that’s festooned with cameras and microphones inside your home where they can record whatever audiovisual data they want and do anything they feel like with it, and two is that Zuck Zuck fervently wishes he were Hiro Protagonist rather than the sniveling dweeb he is in real life.
Just say no to Meta.
i’m not complaining tho.
i don’t want to live in a world where ghouls are actually smart.
Part of it is immense investment in bleeding edge tech that is nowhere near useful or useable. Like their micro-LED (not micro-OLED) displays that they have custom made but that are incapable of competing with existing displays that are multiple orders of magnitude cheaper.
I think that he thinks that throwing tons of money at it will magically make the advancement immediate. The reality is that, just like with software development, after a point, return on investment plateaus and it is not possible to make advancements faster. Without getting hardware into people’s hands at a reasonable cost and enough time to tinker, the problems are not going to get worked out.
Displays gradually improve since like forever, if you want a specific one that doesn’t exist you can calculate roughly when it will exist at a specific price point.
Long haul video game devs did that with GPUs for example.
Guess someone has to throw cash at it, but still…
Yeah. I’m not mad that he’s throwing cash at it, outside of the immense amount of good that that amount of money could do for people, instead of being hoarded and wasted on impatience.
They’re a good ways past the ROI plateau and need to get the displays into the wild before people can figure out how how to make them better (not to mention the literal lab research that’s still needed to figure out how to make the tech competitive in functionality with birdbath which is multiple orders of magnitude cheaper and superior in nearly every way).
The results of what they have created are anything but impressive.
There’s gotta be a sunken cost thing going on, throwing good money after bad.
Really? You could out-do VRChat with just a million?
Make it 2 just to be sure. 😁
Billionaires must get some kind of brain rot from living in their own asses and huffing their own hype all day.
