Metaverse Will Keep Getting 20% of Meta’s Costs

Meta will continue to devote 20% of its investments to its metaverse business. 

While that share goes to its business devoted to such projects — Reality Labs — the other 80% will continue to go to Meta’s core business, Meta Chief Technology Officer and Head of Reality Labs Andrew Bosworth said in a Monday (Dec. 19) blog post. 

“It’s a level of investment we believe makes sense for a company committed to staying at the leading edge of one of the most competitive and innovative industries on earth,” Bosworth said in the post. 

In 2023, Meta will introduce the successor to its best-selling virtual reality (VR) device, Meta Quest 2, and will debut new games at the Meta Quest Gaming Showcase in the spring, Bosworth said. 

Beyond that, it will continue with long-term research aimed at building true augmented reality (AR) glasses. In fact, one-half of Reality Labs’ operating expenses are dedicated to its augmented reality initiatives, Bosworth said. 

“Meta is far from the only company working on pushing the boundaries here, and we expect to see new competitors joining us in building for AR and VR next year,” Bosworth said in the post. “As new devices hit the market, we believe our industry will enter a new era of growth and competition that will bring enormous benefits to users and the developer community.” 

As PYMNTS reported Oct. 26, when Meta announced another huge earnings miss, another massive profit slide and saw another nearly 20% drop in its share price, it also said the Reality Labs division accounted for a $3.67 billion hole in the company’s earnings. 

That brought to $9 billion the amount sunk in the first three quarters, suggesting that CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s prediction that the company would spend $10 billion to $15 billion annually for the next decade is going to come out on the high side of that range. 

To no one’s surprise, Zuckerberg showed no signs of retreat at the time, and in fact doubled down on his insistence that the social media giant’s metaverse spending was wise, necessary and going to continue. 

On Nov. 30, The New York Times reported that Zuckerberg said that while making big investments in the metaverse around the time the economy turned south was a “mistake,” the overall metaverse push would prove doubters wrong. 

“If you’re getting skepticism, you’re pushing hard enough,” Zuckerberg said at the time, per the report. 

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