Facebook's VR Division Lost $13.72 Billion In 2022 - Kotaku

Facebook’s genitor company, Meta, is having a decent time contiguous aft beating gross and idiosyncratic enactment forecasts for its last fiscal 4th of 2022. But its VR part isn’t helping the institution marque money. In fact, it’s costing the institution billions successful losses.

While it’s existent that Meta’s banal is rising successful after-hours trading contiguous aft sharing reasonably affirmative fourth-quarter fiscal results, its VR division, Reality Labs, didn’t person specified affirmative quality to share, arsenic it’s continuing to stroke done wealth astatine a shocking rate. Today, the institution confirmed it mislaid implicit $4 cardinal to VR and metaverse improvement successful its last 4th of 2022. And successful total, it mislaid good implicit $13 cardinal successful 2022 trying (and failing) to physique a metaverse radical would flock to.

In comparison, Meta brought successful $32.1 cardinal successful gross crossed each departments and apps.

As reported by Decrypt.co, Meta’s Reality Labs lone brought successful $727 cardinal successful gross successful the closing months of 2022. That’s not large erstwhile compared to the billions spent connected the part successful the aforesaid year, but it’s besides worse than you mightiness think. That fig is down 17% from the division’s gross successful the aforesaid play of 2021. Ouch.

Remember excessively that Facebook’s flagship metaverse software, Horizon Worlds, has fundamentally been a elephantine flop, with reports that most worlds wrong of it are bare and hardly played. Not lone that, but the company’s ain employees hardly usage it, with a leaked interior memo showing that unit astatine Meta don’t bask utilizing Horizons Worlds due to the fact that it’s riddled with bugs and different prime issues.

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Really the lone large occurrence communicative from Reality Labs is the Oculus Quest 2 headset, which was seen by galore arsenic an affordable alternate to pricey PC and console VR headsets and was besides wholly standalone. But successful July Meta raised the terms of that affordable headset by $100, with the 128GB exemplary present costing $400 and the 256GB mentation present going for $500.

In November 2022, Meta laid disconnected 11,000 employees, blaming covid, “macroeconomic downturn, accrued competition, and ads awesome loss.” Zuckerberg blamed himself for the layoffs, but conveniently didn’t notation successful his announcement of layoffs however overmuch wealth the institution is continuing to spent connected VR and metaverse development. Over the past fewer years the institution has spent tens of billions of dollars trying to marque a VR-powered metaverse a thing.

And now, successful February 2023, pursuing monolithic layoffs and continued losses, it lone has an unappealing and bare PlayStation Home clone to amusement for each its troubles.