This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
It's sort of like how YouTube ran at a loss for a long time. The idea is to get ingrained in the market and make up the money later.
Right now Meta has the best VR / AR that is easily accessible. If some new idea or technology catapults VR into a more popular position, then Meta is in a prime position to take advantage.
Will that happen? I don't know, but Meta seems to think so.
Right now Meta has the best VR / AR that is easily accessible.
Too bad the company is absolute garbage. I'm not even willing to look at their 'products' anymore.
Particularly with articles like this around:
https://observer.com/2024/03/meta-facebook-compete-snapchat-class-action-document/
Yep. I will never use any VR product by Meta. Mark can go zuck himself.
Meta is the only reason I’m staying away from their AR/VR headsets. If it was any other company, I would have jumped in by now.
I don't think the technology is there yet. As long as people need to wear big bulky goggles and headsets it's not going to take off. Make something that's about as cumbersome as sunglasses and less than $1000 and there might be mass adoption.
March 2023 they sold 20M Quests. Half as many as PS5. That counts as "taken off" in my book.
Wow, I'm shocked it's that high. I've never heard of someone using one.
Everyone in my family has one. We play ping pong. It's cool, you feel like you're in the room with someone even when they are many miles away.
Having said that, I believe most of the users are minors. Whenever I log into a multilayer game, there are children taking.
Besides ping pong, there's Best Saber and 3d jigsaw puzzles. Outside of that, I haven't really had much fun outside of occasional shooting / archery.
It sucks that it's owned by Facebook of course. I deleted my Facebook over 10 years ago now. I had to set it up with my girlfriend's Facebook account.
Everyone in my family has one. We play ping pong.
This reads like a joke. 50 years of technological development and people are just playing hi-tech pong.
With people* they aren't physically near to
I think that's the important part
I bought vr for simracing...I use vr for Beat Saber
I play putt-putt with my sister and we're both in our fifties.
Daily active users are a much better indicator of success.
Halo infinite had a peak player count if 272,000. Now it sees DAU of only 3,000
VR is already great today, and lots of us are enjoying it. I know several people with VR systems.
See also: Meta's recent opening of their vr headset OS to other hardware manufacturers.
They don't give a shit about profit at this stage as long as they control it and can use it to suppress the development of any kind of competitors.
There are a lot of problems keeping VR from going big and I think Meta's strategy of cornering the market is one of them. They think if they get all the exclusives they'll be the next iPhone but I think instead they're fragmenting an already tiny market which really needs a bunch of impressive experiences (and there still aren't a ton right now, even after years of VR development). I feel like the reverse would win them more users - they should win on hardware AND software but make their software available for any VR headset to use. Because right now they need to help create a market for VR because there really isn't one worth cornering yet.
They just announced that they opened up the OS for other manufacturers to use. I know Asus/ROG is supposed to have a headset in the works using the OS.
YouTube still runs at a loss
I'm surprised they made 440m. However, investing in r+d is not unusual. This amount is not a huge investment for them based in overall revenue.
If you report a loss you don't pay taxes. Or something like that I'm not an accountant.
Bezos actually was refunded tax $ one year
Write-offs are entirely misunderstood by people. Writing off losses doesn't magically make loss profitable.
I'll use myself as an example. I teach underwater photography at a university as a side gig. Last year I made about $3,000 teaching the class, and I also spent about $1,000 on underwater camera gear for the class. Because of that I get to reduce my taxable income by $1,000, so it's as if I made $2,000.
At my tax bracket a write-off reduces my income taxes by 22% of the expense. So on a thousand-dollar purchase I'm still losing nearly 800 bucks.
And you still have the value, nobody takes it away from you and you propably can sell it without loss which makes it still a good deal.
Of course it's better than not having the write-off. But it's not like it's free.
Business expenses aren't profit so they aren't taxed because it's money you didn't actually make.
Since most businesses operate on a small margin, removing tax deductions would make tax burdens higher than profits.
And it's not like that camera lens isn't being taxed. I'm buying it from a company that pays taxes on its profits and payroll and whose employees pay taxes, and on top of that I'm paying sales tax (to a different entity of course).
So what? R&D expenses aren't supposed to turn an immediate profit. Developing a new technology can take years before it's earning money, and some never do. I'm all aboard the "hate meta" train, but that's nothing.
I can't believe I'm saying this, but these companies need to pay more taxes. Losing $3.9 billion dollars on a stupid vanity project because they have nothing else to spend it on is ridiculous. Higher taxes would at least force them to be more efficient.
You're not really talking about higher taxes, you're talking about reworking the corporate tax system. As things stand now higher taxes would encourage more of this sort of behavior, not less.
Corporations only pay taxes on profits, so money spent on business activities, re-invested back into the company, paid to employees, etc. is not taxed. In this system, taxes are kind of a penalty paid for taking money out of the business; the higher taxes are the less incentivized profit-taking is.
If your company made $100 million in profits at a 20% tax rate you get to take home $80 million as opposed to re-investing $100 million back in the company and not paying any taxes, so the incentive to re-invest isn't very high. But if your company made $100 million in profits at a 40% tax rate now you can only take home $60 million as opposed to re-investing $100 million, which becomes a much better value proposition on re-investment.
Whether VR works for Meta or not, they have invested in technology and built careers for employees. This is why we should have corporate taxes. I'd rather see corporations keep employees and advance technology instead of giving dividends to the wealthiest people in the world. While the product might not work out, I bet there are many people who worked on it that will take those skills to new projects.
As others have said, the implication in this article's title is silly... Surely an r&d phase start easily explains this
What I'm curious about is how you spend that much money in such little time? Was that money actually spent or just committed?
$1900 per second is a hell of a burn rate for anything outside the US military
You reckon Apple made money on it's VR division either?
Almost nobody is making big money on VR, because nobody wants to work together to make it into a widely compatible common standard. If you could have one headset that worked on all platforms, for a reasonable price, you'd get a lot more take up, and nicer headsets costing more would make more sense.
It's maybe unpopular, but I agree that if you're going to leverage your success to make a bet on the next big thing, VR/AR is a great choice. I agree it's inevitable that many computing interfaces will eventually become a personalized virtual space, and AR will eventually become a permanent way to add our "computer brains'" data to our vision.
Obviously we're not there yet. And there's always going to be a contingent that thinks that future will never come. But I do think it'll come, when that one thing or things we need VR/AR to do and can't seem to imagine life without are eventually found. Zuck doesn't know where the inflection point is going to happen but he's positioning Meta to be in the ideal place to own the space. He seems to know it may not happen for a long time. He's gambling he can afford to wait for it, which is a bet I'd take.
Why that’s a 10% return on investment!
Business lesson, : never build a factory because it won't pay for itself in the first year.
And yes I know it's hard to hear but Meta's vr is doing really well in the areas they targeted, industry, academia, and special use. This is likely to end up a profitable part of their business for a long time.
Yeah unfortunately I agree, as much as I dread knowing Meta's going to be behind a lot of the VR/AR developments as it gets more common, this isn't really an indication that they screwed up. They're not the first company I'd want to lead the VR market but it looks like they will be regardless.
Zuck read Ready Player One and wants so badly to be James Halliday. He just wants to be loved. 🤣
its like they have too much money and they're burning it away on bad ideas. Imagine how much public housing that money could have built.
I mean, you do understand that this money isn’t just vanishing right? It’s being spent on people, manufacturing, materials. It doesn’t just vanish into nothing.
yeah it gets distributed in the economy and gets absorbed in the system. at least it's not being hoarded or funneled outside the country.
the other poster is just parroting things they do not understand.
They have the best VR headset in the market. The only problem is that it's also mining all your data.
I know it's apples to oranges and what not, but there's a lot of life changing things you could do for a lot of people with that kind of money.
As a society the way we allocate resources is stupid.
