When Meta (née Facebook) announced the prices of the two-year-old Meta (née Oculus) Quest 2 were going up by £100 each, it cited the need to continually reinvest in VR’s future.
Well, now we’ve learned just how much that investment in the wider Metaverse is costing the social network, and just how little the extra £100s generated by sales are going to do to put a dent in it.
In its quarterly earnings call on June 27, Meta revealed its Reality Labs VR division lost $2.8 billion (about £2.3bn) in the last three months alone.
The continuing presence of red pen in the books for Meta comes despite the increasing popularity of the Quest 2 headset and an improvement in the quality and quantity of the software available.
Last year the division lost $2.4 billion and $2.96 billion in the first three months of the year, so this is an ongoing issue that shows the company’s VR ambitions are still a massive loss leader at present (via Venture Beat).
In the earnings call, the company said it expects Reality Labs revenue to drop further in the next three months and adding £100/$100 to the price of the most popular product on the market is likely to play a role.
The company said in a blog post yesterday: “Now, we’re making a change that will help us continue to invest for the long term and keep driving the VR industry forward with best-in-class hardware, action-packed games, and cutting-edge research on the path to truly next-gen devices.”
Thankfully for Facebook, it still made almost $6.7 billion in net income during the last three months, from 1.97 billion active users across its platforms. However, whether shareholders will continue to abide by Zuckerberg’s massive bet on the future of civilisation – while almost half of that figure is being lost every three months – remains to be seen.
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Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
