Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Technology sector myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.As of the end of 2024, the cumulative losses suffered by Meta’s Reality Labs division since the company changed its name from Facebook and pivoted to Mark Zuckerberg’s “Metaverse” stood at $68.9bn. Some of Facebook’s AI efforts seem to be housed in Reality Labs, but most of the cash burn appears to be driven by Zuckerberg’s much-hyped embrace of the metaverse. Almost as astonishingly, revenues at the division have actually fallen from the 2021 high of $2.3bn, to $2.1bn in 2024 according to Meta’s latest results. Throw in the $2bn it paid for virtual reality headset maker Oculus in 2014 and it’s roughly enough to buy Coinbase, General Dynamics, FedEx, the Hilton hotel chain, Nasdaq, or — perhaps most pertinently — Roblox, and still have nearly enough change left to acquire Reddit. If you’re curious what else $70bn and change might get you these days, check out this latest ad from Meta’s Horizons, the company’s flagship virtual reality world (you can find it on Instagram here, but because of embed issues we’ll put a tweet with the video below): This is Meta’s brand new ad for Horizon Worlds. Not sure how I’m supposed to feel about it. pic.twitter.com/psktJehk1f— Nathie (@NathieVR) February 16, 2025
The comments on Instagram are . . . unkind.These days, Horizons mostly seems to be a grim Lord-of-the-flies dystopia for a few thousand children whose parents were affluent enough to buy them Oculus goggles. This ad seems to be Meta’s pivot to add the “sad, terminally-online adults with no IRL friends to moan about their exes with” demographic. Judging by the current political environment that could be a fairly large market segment, but it’s still a weird marketing gambit. If you think this is a bit unfair, remember that this is the company whose CEO went on a podcast and accused Apple of being insufficiently innovative. Still, Zuckerberg seemingly remains convinced that this represents the future of his company. On Meta’s fourth-quarter earnings call with analysts last month he predicted that 2025 is going to be a “pivotal year for the metaverse”: The number of people using Quest and Horizon has been steadily growing. And this is a year when a number of the long-term investments that we’ve been working on that will make the metaverse more visually stunning and inspiring will really start to land. So I think we’re going to know a lot more about Horizon’s trajectory by the end of this year.Cynics might note that Meta still won’t say how many users Horizon actually has though. Further reading:— We asked metaverse users what they think of Apple’s VR headset (FTAV)
