There’s little doubt that Facebook is placing huge bets on virtual reality as being the future of almost everything, but we never quite got a sense of the scale behind those efforts until Meta revealed its most recent earnings report which showed that it spent no less than $10 billion on the VR division.
That’s a lot of money, enough even to drag down profits for the company, the New York Times reports.
To put this in even more of a perspective, it’s five times what the company paid for the company behind the Oculus VR headsets and 10 times what it shelled out for Instagram, arguably the company’s shining jewel of late.
Looking ahead, Facebook cited some of the more recent changes to Apple’s app store policy and what kind of data it allows apps to have as being a serious headwind for the company moving forward, estimated to cost them some $10 billion in ad revenue this year alone.
It only follows that Meta is looking to build out its own ecosystem of products. The question remains whether VR/AR or whatever it ends up being is a viable solution in a pretty competitive market. After all, there’s no real demonstrable benefit on a broad scale to do things in VR but maybe that will change.
“Ultimately, our continued success relies on building products that people find valuable and that people want to use,” Mark Zuckerberg said during the earnings call.
We’ll wait and see.
What’s your opinion of VR and, more broadly, Facebook’s metaverse concept? Let us know your thoughts on Facebook’s spending in the comments below.
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