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/
Thats why https://sidequestvr.com/ exists.
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.
I agree that the tech isn’t there, but unless we figure out some new physics it’s going to be impossible to put enough battery, computing power, and cooling capacity in something the size of sunglasses. So the tech for VR like we really want is at least 20 years away, if not more.
Idk man, if you let go of the requirement of wireless and standalone, we’re already there.
So I’m expecting there to be a lot more headsets like that next gen.
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.
So they want to be the Microcrap of the VR world?
Nah I’m good, let me know when we get a Linux of the VR world
The index is better overall and I love mine, but I can’t help but feel jealous that someone can just grab their quest, put it on and get into VR immediately. I have to cart my PC downstairs, turn the base stations on, find the index and wire it all up, troubleshoot why Windows has decided to mess up the drivers and now nothing works, and maybe half an hour later finally get into a game or completely give up and try again another time.
The quest gains a lot in portability and ease of setup, and that does result in a lot of other features being sacrificed but to most people the downsides don’t matter as much.
Its not just YouTube. Pleant of companies lose money on their product Loss leader
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.
Yeah. Come back in 10-15 years when half the world is using it or a successive product and people will be posting articles like these laughing at them like they do with the ones saying the internet or cell phones will never catch on and surprisingly no one will open up and admit they were the ones denying it would come. Meta has the money, they don’t care how much they spend, as long as they can get in and corner the market early they will make it back many times over in the years to come… assuming climate change or nukes don’t make it impossible 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.
Many people have no clue how taxes work, but darn it, they wanted them raised. It just encourages other behaviors, such as offshoring money, as many companies do. We really need a complete write of the tax code to encourage paying workers well, creating jobs, etc and less focus on avoiding paying the taxes. I don’t care if a company makes billions in profit if their workers are all paid well, treated well, etc. We will make it up with them having money to spend in the economy.
I am still not convinced VR is a worthy technology outside of a few niche uses. I went to the verge when that was open and that was pretty cool. At home is nothing like that.
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
