No Stupid Questions

Employee salaries, server running costs, hardware manufacturing fees, miscellaneous R and D costs

Because most articles you see online are written to get clicks, not to actually inform you, and no one particularly cares to defend meta, so no one bothers correcting them.

But saying that meta spent $80B on the metaverse and is now shutting it down because they're shutting down horizon worlds is flat out disingenuous.

First of all, let's be clear, the $80B number is the accumulated losses of the entire Reality Labs division over the past 6 years. Reality Labs includes not just the Oculus teams that cover AR and VR, but also other teams like the cancelled Portal hardware / software, and their Facebook Spark AR (closer to snapchat filters).

Second of all, those losses include

• all the R&D costs of developing the Quest 2, Quest Pro, Quest 3, the various Ray Ban collab glasses, and their unreleased future headsets / AR glasses.
  • The R&D costs related to the controllers and input devices.
  • Some of the R&D costs for the display technology used.
  • The R&D costs for developing machine learning based 6DOF inside-out tracking, and hand tracking.
  • Developing and customizing Android into a viable operating system for all their devices.
  • Subsidizing the cost of every VR headset they sold to grow the market (and they sold more Quest headsets then Microsoft sold Xboxes)
  • Developing VR utility apps like the browser, the Link system, the HDMI in / capture card system, the desktop link apps, etc.
  • Buying a bunch of VR studios and games like Beat Saber, that mountain boxing game, etc
  • developing multiple top quality VR games like Assassin's Creed, Batman, and a Resident Evil 4 remake
  • And yes, developing and supporting their social VR app, Horizon Worlds, which has never been as popular as third party alternatives.

Out of all of that, they have shut down just Horizon Worlds, and the VR studios / games they bought. All of the hardware and platform work is still ongoing.

And what does it buy them? The potential opportunity to be Google or Apple once AR glasses become light and powerful enough to be common place. Do you know how many billions of dollars Google and Apple have made from being the dominant mobile OS companies? Microsoft rode the Windows train for decades before switching to Azure. Meta is buying a chance at becoming that for AR.

Didn't it include r&d for thr vr headset?

Some soulless husks with too much money read Snowcrash (or had their LLM summarize it) and didn't understand that it's a dystopia.

1. What is the Metaverse?

• an online persistent 3D world with avatars tied to real identities, tied to VR hardware.
• or, a failed project, since Meta is likely mothballing most of it.

2. How did it cost $80mil?

• it was the first potentially big consumer of modern VR hardware, and was built up from scratch.
• If Meta assigned 320 people to develop it and the supporting hardware and technologies, add in cost of hardware and after a year you’ve easily spent $80mil, even if you have nothing to show for it.

3. Why is it just 2nd Life?

• because that’s the only bit they fully completed before cutting the funding firehose. Of course, it’s “2nd life IN VR!”, not just a simple re-do. Personally, I think they would have done better to base it on a Minecraft-like concept.
• Remember that 2nd Life is really just a glorified MOO with graphical overlay. The Sims is really a similar concept too, as is Eve Online.