Less-Astronaut-8904 t1_itx696g wrote on October 26, 2022 at 11:19 PM

Reply to comment by GhettoChemist in Facebook owner Meta sales continue to fall by umberto_pagano

If you look at their financials they are up considerably year over year in most categories. The thing that caused this reduced profit is from increased spending on their VR and AR research and product design.

drekwithoutpolitics t1_itzjx5m wrote on October 27, 2022 at 1:38 PM

But that’s still a very bad sign to me, given that most people seem to know their VR research isn’t likely to pay off for a long time, if at all. Net income down 35%? Holy shit, even if 15% of that was for the (vanity) VR investment, that’s insane to me!

The VR investment reminds me a little bit of Microsoft buying Skype for $8.5 billion in 2011. It was Microsoft’s biggest purchase ever at the time, and you could argue it absolutely didn’t pay off investment-wise for MS. The tech isn’t worth $8.5 billion.

The difference is that Microsoft had other things going for it. Meta has WhatsApp and Instagram, but it’s not clear to me how they’ll recoup their losses on this VR stuff without shutting it down in a few years in another embarrassment.

Less-Astronaut-8904 t1_iu1kuxj wrote on October 27, 2022 at 9:36 PM

I have a headset from them so I might be biased but I 100% believe that VR will be the future and make a ton of money for whatever company makes the best and highest quality headsets. Right now that's Meta, at least in Western countries. But yea, I eventually see them having to slow things down with all the VR investment. On their financials page, they only have about 1 billion in free cash flow, however, they plan to spend 97-108 billion total next year.