Get ready for some breaking metaverse news. Meta’s leaders say the metaverse is still a top priority even though the numbers show otherwise.
Meta stock went up by more than 18% after hours on Wednesday, after a quarterly earnings report that was better than expected. But Meta’s increasing tides weren’t enough to help the tech giant’s disturbed metaverse division.
The company’s Reality Labs, which focuses on the metaverse, lost a whopping $4.28 billion in the last fiscal quarter of 2022, according to an announcement made by Meta. This marks a new low for the struggling department, which has been frequently promoted as the company’s future. The announcement made on Wednesday raised the total losses for the metaverse business in 2022 to a staggering $13.72 billion.
In the last months of 2022, the division generated just $727 million in sales, a 17% decrease compared to the same time period last year.
Reality Labs creates hardware and software for virtual and augmented reality experiences, such as the Quest virtual reality headset and the Horizon Worlds project.
Meta’s leadership seemed generally optimistic on Wednesday’s quarterly results call despite the company’s revenue, daily active users, monthly active users, and average revenue per user above expectations.
Most importantly, the corporation surpassed sales expectations of $31.53 billion with $32.1 billion in revenue across all departments and apps. Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, said on Wednesday’s earnings call that the next fiscal year will be a “year of efficiency,” starting with the founder’s November layoffs of 11,000 workers. Zuckerberg promised Meta would be scrappy after the layoffs.
“We’re going to be more proactive about cutting projects that aren’t performing,” he said, as an example.
But it seems that flailing metaverse goals don’t count. Zuckerberg made it clear over and over again on Wednesday that Reality Labs was not going anywhere and should be kept as an investment.
“Our priorities haven’t changed,” Zuckerberg said. “The two major technological waves driving our roadmap are AI today, and, over the longer term, the metaverse.” “I expect [Quest 3] will establish this technology as the baseline for all headsets going forward, and eventually for AR headsets as well,” Zuckerberg said.
Meta hopes that the headset will not only boost hardware sales for the beleaguered division, but also promote the firm’s Horizon Worlds virtual reality ecosystem, which Zuckerberg has previously touted as the future of interactive business, entertainment, and social interaction.
Meta hopes that the headset will not only bring in more money for the struggling hardware division, but also help spread the word about the company’s Horizon Worlds virtual reality ecosystem, which Zuckerberg has said is the future of business, entertainment, and social interaction.
In October, a report said that even though Reality Labs gave Horizon Worlds tens of billions of dollars, it was so hard and annoying to utilize that even Meta employees who participated in the project didn’t use it when they could.
Source: www.decrypt.com
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