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Kotaku: Facebooks VR division lost over $13.72 billion in 2022. $4 billion loss just in Q4 2022.

Facebook probably desperately wants Quest 3 to launch so they can reset expectations and justify a $600 price tag

PSVR2’s price is a bargain but Sony isn’t willing to take a loss. Soon Meta won’t either

Quest 3 going to be under $600 for sure unless they are aiming to got for premium parts and features like PSVR2 which is unlikely. Probably max $500, they aren't going to deviate too far from Quest 2's (current) price.
 
Quest 3 going to be under $600 for sure unless they are aiming to got for premium parts and features like PSVR2 which is unlikely. Probably max $500, they aren't going to deviate too far from Quest 2's (current) price.

Quest 2 is probably more expensive to manufacture than PSVR2, it’s just selling at a massive loss

Mobile chips + Batteries are not cheap
 
They need to tighten their shit up. Fuck the metaverse or prosumer models of your quest brand, and focus on low cost units that first and foremost focus on videogames. Do that and build up your marketshare, give people a reason to buy in, and when you have 30-40 million sold and VR is mainstream, seque into the metaverse and all the big plans. Nobody gives a fuck about what is possible in 5-10 years. We want games and we want them today.
 

Foilz

Banned
Facebook/meta has in all honesty done a great job with oculus. I absolutely love mine and the devs who have been making games and apps for VR have made some unique experiences.i have read the reports but is this an actual loss or does this take into account the cost in developing and making the quest pro which was a waste at over $1200
 

anthony2690

Banned
I thought meta sold 9.8 million units last year? (What I thought was insanely high for vr)

I could be mixed up, that could be total vr headsets sold last year.

Why is meta losing so much money? Is it sold at a massive loss or something?
 

IntentionalPun

Ask me about my wife's perfect butthole
While it's true Meta spends a ton on Meta-verse alone, people need to realize they are also losing loads of money on VR gaming as well.

(not to mention the fact we are only here w/ so many Quest's sold because Meta subsidized the cost heavily, due to their pipe dream about Metaverse)

I'll repeat it again..

They hit $1.5 billion in TOTAL REVENUE for the quest store as of last October:


Facebook tried to hype these numbers as good, but they've easily lost a lot more than that on hardware sales, especially factoring in that $1.5 billion is shared with other devs (although their cut is really fucking high lol)

Seeing their business shrink YOY revenue wise with hardware prices going significantly up..... oh man.
 
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gothmog

Gold Member
Quest 3 going to be under $600 for sure unless they are aiming to got for premium parts and features like PSVR2 which is unlikely. Probably max $500, they aren't going to deviate too far from Quest 2's (current) price.
I doubt we'll see the massive subsidy Quest 1 and 2 launched with but I agree it will be under $600.

Zuck bet the company that those price points would get half a billion people on Meta headsets in 5 years. I think they're like 10-20 million sold which is great, but not what they were expecting with the subsidy.

I really don't even understand what his vision really is, and I'm a VR enthusiast. There's no killer app or form factor yet, so why would most people want this?
 
Quest 2 is probably more expensive to manufacture than PSVR2, it’s just selling at a massive loss

Mobile chips + Batteries are not cheap

You do realize PSVR2 has mobile tech in it right?

I doubt we'll see the massive subsidy Quest 1 and 2 launched with but I agree it will be under $600.

Zuck bet the company that those price points would get half a billion people on Meta headsets in 5 years. I think they're like 10-20 million sold which is great, but not what they were expecting with the subsidy.

I really don't even understand what his vision really is, and I'm a VR enthusiast. There's no killer app or form factor yet, so why would most people want this?

I mean they didn't really take advantage of their momentum for the by now 20 million shipped they may have gotten with the Quest 2, they kind of let it burn out.

Sure doing that in 2 years is impressive, but the drop off is big, and he needs to have a plan to keep people engaged, but even his own companies data as mentioned here elsewhere, shows that people aren't using the headsets long term, or at least many people aren't. Quest 3 has to come with better commitment or the competition is going to take over, which is what I'm expecting.

Its clear instead of continuous support, he expected Horizons to be the fuel to keep the Quest 2 headset going, despite the fact people were buying Quest 2 for the price and novelty of the software it had, which Zucker never followed up on because he though people would use his experiment software long-term. If he doesn't course correct than he may as well throw out VR entirely.
 
Jack Nicholson Reaction GIF
 
Sure, but it does not need nearly as much because most processing is being handled by the PS5.

Sony also sources some of their own components and is able to get things like cameras for cheaper. Not to mention their expertise in hardware assembly.

No doubt in my mind Quest 2 costs more to make than PSVR2.

They have like 3 mobile chip partners helping power the thing or aid in features, including Mediatek.

I highly doubt Quest 3 is going to cost more to make than the PSVR2, and in fact i am willing to bet Sony is going to take a loss on the headset and bet on software sales just like PSVR1.

Of course, Quest 3 will also probably take a loss, but probably not as much as the Quest 2 did.
 
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They have like 3 mobile chip partners helping power the thing or aid in features, including Mediatek.

I highly doubt Quest 3 is going to cost more to make than the PSVR2, and in fact i am willing to bet Sony is going to take a loss on the headset and bet on software sales just like PSVR1.

Of course, Quest 3 will also probably take a loss, but probably not as much as the Quest 2 did.

There's SOME CHIPS, like I said, not nearly as big and powerful as what's needed on Quest 2.

Battery is another big cost. External sourcing of all parts - another cost. Lack of assembly experience - another cost.

It adds up.

If PSVR2 is sold at a loss we should know about it during their next quartly earnings report. My guess is that it's sold at cost or slightly profitable.
 

gothmog

Gold Member
You do realize PSVR2 has mobile tech in it right?



I mean they didn't really take advantage of their momentum for the by now 20 million shipped they may have gotten with the Quest 2, they kind of let it burn out.

Sure doing that in 2 years is impressive, but the drop off is big, and he needs to have a plan to keep people engaged, but even his own companies data as mentioned here elsewhere, shows that people aren't using the headsets long term, or at least many people aren't. Quest 3 has to come with better commitment or the competition is going to take over, which is what I'm expecting.

Its clear instead of continuous support, he expected Horizons to be the fuel to keep the Quest 2 headset going, despite the fact people were buying Quest 2 for the price and novelty of the software it had, which Zucker never followed up on because he though people would use his experiment software long-term. If he doesn't course correct than he may as well throw out VR entirely.
Horizons is dumb. I don't know why people want a virtual world. Too expensive to build IMO. Look at mobile. I don't expect seamless transitions between apps. Also, the mobile shopping experience itself is not great. The convenience of it is what drives its usage. All Zuck needed to do was develop some quality shopping experiences and buy/build a chat app. Instead he focused on some kind of weird world building experiences and overcomplicated the whole thing.
 

Crayon

Member
Part of the issue is tapping a casual audience. Giving it away for 299 to people who are going to buy beat saber and a star wars game then shelve it after is throwing money down the drain. The best games like pavlov and bonelab are for the people who will actually keep using the thing and buying more games. That could be a small minority by now. Maybe they should have focused on those people more.
 
Horizons is dumb. I don't know why people want a virtual world. Too expensive to build IMO. Look at mobile. I don't expect seamless transitions between apps. Also, the mobile shopping experience itself is not great. The convenience of it is what drives its usage. All Zuck needed to do was develop some quality shopping experiences and buy/build a chat app. Instead he focused on some kind of weird world building experiences and overcomplicated the whole thing.

He wanted to lock people in an ecosystem that would be considered a "standard" instead of an "option". He basically wanted to be the laserdisc or VHS of VR, and other companies would go off of that, and even rebranded the company name for this exact reason because if this plan succeeded, people would call everything related to the same idea the same name.

He knows that he had a head start and wanted to try and capture as much audience as possible for that goal which is why he wasn't upset about the billions lost.

Problem is his tyrannical sci-fi movie plan to push everyone to "his" standard not only was poorly executed, but VR is not the format for his plan to work, at least not as it is now. Until we can put on sunglasses and give the illusion we can walk in downtown france from 4000 miles away at home in VR/AR, progress we are nowhere near, this Horizons idea can't possibly work.
 
Keep seeing people say Sony should try to buy Ready at Dawn from them... What makes anyone think Sony is interested in Ready at Dawn and if they were wouldn't they have bought them when they had a chance?

Granted, they shat the bed on their first PS4 project. Still, I am of the opinion that there is potential there: They do have some talented artists and coders that are suited to AAA gaming, and are really good at VR as well. It would not cost Sony that much, imo, and while it is understandable that the manufacturer did not deem it necessary to continue the relationship with the team after The Order 1886 crashed and burned, Sony was not, at the time, faced with a MS that is buying developers left and right.
 
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Synless

Member
Zuck will have the last laugh. Meta will continue to grow and become more profitable. Most of you have long term vision of about a day, maybe a week at best.

To be clear, I don’t give a fuck about him. I do however know he is on the right track.
 
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ReBurn

Gold Member
Yes it did! If you like fantastic worlds, incredible moments of discovery, and breath-taking experiences only possible in VR, I'd recommend not trying it, because it has none of that and is actually quite terrible.
It's like second life but somehow worse
 

THE DUCK

voted poster of the decade by bots
This doesn't bode well right now, but the tech is evolving fast. Facebook sees this as an investment in the future. Still probably looking at losses for the next few years but then it should turn around.
 

Reallink

Member
I thought meta sold 9.8 million units last year? (What I thought was insanely high for vr)

I could be mixed up, that could be total vr headsets sold last year.

Why is meta losing so much money? Is it sold at a massive loss or something?

It was total headsets IIRC, but Quest 2 likely represented 90%+ of sales last year so your original assumption was pretty accurate. Certainly nobody's buying 4 year old Index's or 8 year old PSVR's in any real quantity, and everything else combined is fighting over 2% or 3% marketshare.
 
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poppabk

Cheeks Spread for Digital Only Future
This doesn't bode well right now, but the tech is evolving fast. Facebook sees this as an investment in the future. Still probably looking at losses for the next few years but then it should turn around.
The problem is that they don't have a tech advantage, software or hardware, any of the big players can try and step in at any time if it starts to take off. They are trying to be there at the ground floor, but things like VRchat are eating their lunch on the social side, and business uptake I am not sure is there yet.
 
Granted, they shat the bed on their first PS4 project. Still, I am of the opinion that there is potential there: They do have some talented artists and coders that are suited to AAA gaming, and are really good at VR as well. It would not cost Sony that much, imo, and while it is understandable that they did deem it necessary to continue the relationship with the team after The Order 1886 crashed and burned, Sony were not, at the time, faced with a MS that is buying developers left and right.

Plenty of studios Sony can still buy… they don’t need Ready at Dawn
 

StreetsofBeige

Gold Member
To put the $13-14B loss on VR Labs in perspective, P&G (Procter & Gamble) one of the biggest consumer goods companies in the world makes about $13-14B profit per year. And that's after selling about $80B in sales per year.

Meta' VR Labs blew threw the equivalent corporate profits of a giant company who annually sells $80B with 100,000 employees.
 
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I can only think of five that fit the previous model: Deviation Games, Firewalk, Unseen Studio(s?), Arrowhead and Ballistic Moon. Those five MIGHT accept to join the WWS structure.

Bungie doesn't fit that model and not all purchases do.

Depending on what happens with ABK, I think Sony will target bigger options T2, CDPR, Square Enix, Capcom, Sega, Kadokawa/FromSoftware e.t.c.

I actually think Kadokawa/FromSoftware is a definite and the only thing holding it up is ABK.
 

anthony2690

Banned
It was total headsets IIRC, but Quest 2 likely represented 90%+ of sales last year so your original assumption was pretty accurate. Certainly nobody's buying 4 year old Index's or 8 year old PSVR's in any real quantity, and everything else combined is fighting over 2% or 3% marketshare.
Why are all these companies even bothering if Meta is dominating but losing billions with an assumption at roughly 90% market share? It kinda makes no sense to me.

If these other people are fighting for a 2/3% market share they are probably also losing money too right?
 

cyberheater

PS4 PS4 PS4 PS4 PS4 PS4 PS4 PS4 PS4 PS4 PS4 PS4 PS4 PS4 PS4 PS4 PS4 Xbone PS4 PS4
Quite an achievement selling the most popular headset on the planet with some of the best games and still losing a ton of money.
 

Reallink

Member
They are spending it on non-gaming related stuff. Face recreation, quest pro, the horizon stuff.

No, there was a recent interview or investor meeting where Zuckercuck copped to their actual software spend, which would only include Horizons in your example. Pro and their pie in the sky future tech stuff would be lumped in with R&D and hardware development, which dwarfs the 4 or 5 billion for software Zuck quoted "over the past 2 or 3 years". The R&D umbrella would account for the additional 30+ billion spent over that same span. They've been spending over 10 billion on VR every year for like the past 5 years. As I said, he has mentioned software was "only" 1.5 - 2 billion of that every year.

Why are all these companies even bothering if Meta is dominating but losing billions with an assumption at roughly 90% market share? It kinda makes no sense to me.

If these other people are fighting for a 2/3% market share they are probably also losing money too right?

Facebook is losing billions cause they're retarded and will be a text book definition of gross inefficiency and mismanagement for centuries in business schools. It doesn't cost a fraction of what they're burning to put up an Android store, fund some indie or single-A games, and build headsets from the same commodity parts everyone else is using. Plenty of competitors have replicated (or bettered) both their hardware and software with what Facebook spends in 1 week (or 1 day in some the Chinese startup's case). And that's not hyperbole, Facebook burned nearly 300 million dollars a week last year on VR (14 billion / 52). Valve, HTC, Sony, etc certainly aren't spending billions on VR, you're talking about low hundreds of millions at best. The Pimax's, Varjo's, and Shiftalls are spending 10's of millions. It is absolutely mind boggling where this money could possibly be going. Oculus should be 10 years ahead of everyone else on hardware, with a $300,000,000 AAAA game releasing every single week on the Quest store.
 
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Tams

Gold Member
What company HAS actually profitted from VR? Oculus? Sony? Valve? Thats a no across the board.
Sony and HTC.

Sony were already in the HMD scene for years. For HTC, it's pretty much all they have left.

Then there are the Chinese companies like Pimax. I have no idea what their funding and financial circumstances are like though.

There's also a company called Vuvix that exclusively made HMDs. I don't think they gave full VR a try though and have switched solely to the enterprise market.
 

justiceiro

Marlboro: Other M
It's really puzzling how the entirety of the team that worked on horizons is not fired yet. It's making star citizen looking like a good investment.
 

M1chl

Currently Gif and Meme Champion
Because no content, it is extremely unfortunate, that basically without PC Oculus 2 is useless. Well maybe beat saber, but otherwise, like where are 3D movies, documentaries and so on. It is painful.
 

Dick Jones

Gold Member
As someone who has very little interest in the metaverse, I honestly don't know what anyone wants from it. What do people want?
I'd say it's for people who are socially awkward and want to live in a digital world. Thinking everyone wants to jump on board is wrong. Concentrate on your core audience and build out from it.
 
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