ResilientBanana
Member
Especially when people think stupidest is a word.
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Hey Guest. Check out your NeoGAF Wrapped 2025 results here!
Metaverse is dead after $80 Billion poured into it
- Thread starter Wastelander92
- Start date
Jaybe
Member
Metaverse was one of Microsoft's rationales for spending $70 billion on Activision Blizzard. If not for the hubris around it at the time, I wonder if the even would have bothered.
From the press release when they announced the acquisition:
This acquisition will accelerate the growth in Microsoft's gaming business across mobile, PC, console and cloud and will provide building blocks for the metaverse.
"Gaming is the most dynamic and exciting category in entertainment across all platforms today and will play a key role in the development of metaverse platforms," said Satya Nadella, chairman and CEO, Microsoft.
news.microsoft.com
From the press release when they announced the acquisition:
This acquisition will accelerate the growth in Microsoft's gaming business across mobile, PC, console and cloud and will provide building blocks for the metaverse.
"Gaming is the most dynamic and exciting category in entertainment across all platforms today and will play a key role in the development of metaverse platforms," said Satya Nadella, chairman and CEO, Microsoft.
Microsoft to acquire Activision Blizzard to bring the joy and community of gaming to everyone, across every device - Source
Legendary games, immersive interactive entertainment and publishing expertise accelerate growth in Microsoft’s Gaming business across mobile, PC, console and cloud. REDMOND, Wash. and Santa Monica, Calif. – Jan. 18, 2022 – With three billion people actively playing games today, and fueled by a...
news.microsoft.com
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TransTrender
Gold Member
I wonder where the epicenter of this spend was happening, and if that caused localized bubbles of inflation from a bunch of people being paid dirty, dirty money while doing for their job and instead focusing on their own hobbies or side hustles.
StreetsofBeige
Gold Member
Google says from 2020 to 2026 VR Labs had 10-15k employees per year. Before that, data is sketchy and only 1000 people or something. We can ignore all this for sake of argument.
So you got 7 years (including 2026) at an avg of lets says 12,000 people/yr. Multiplied by 7 years of salary is 84,000 years worth of salary.
84,000 x $100k avg salary/benefits = $8.4B
$200k = $16.8B
$300k = $25.2B
This excludes all the R&D costs etc.... The $80B might include all costs of VR goggles and such too which would be billions. By 2023 it says they sold 20M VR goggles, then it slowed down a lot. 7M in 2024 and 4M in 2025. So roughly 31M Meta VR goggles. Whatever COGs those are, add that to the employee wages. At $200 as an example, thats another $6.2B.
Shotgunning the numbers I did quickly, I'm struggling myself to see how to get anywhere close to $80B even if COGs of hardware are included. Add in some other costs here and there and maybe I get up to half the $80B.
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newtypepilot
Member
spent 80m of investor's money
the grift never ends
the grift never ends
Average salary+benefits+overhead per employee is closer to $1M/year, not $100k.
A lot easier for your math to work out!
spookyfish
Gold Member
EDIT: I really don't need to be an a-hole. My bad.
Are 'stupider' and 'stupidest' real words?
Some smart advice on modifying adjectives
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StreetsofBeige
Gold Member
Those VR F'ers get that much? Googling it, it says avg guy is about $540k including pay, bonus, stock comp, but the top guys get $1M+. Damn!
@$500k = $42B
@$540k = $45.4B
@$750k = $63B
@$1M = $84B
That $80B is within reach, especially if VR gear COGs are included.
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SlimySnake
Flashless at the Golden Globes
lol you guys need to stop falling for this stuff. No one spends $80 billion on software development. this was classic hollywood accounting. its a money laundering operation. the money is being shipped elsewhere. either that or its a tax avoidance scheme. if they show that the software development was capital then they can deduct that and pay no taxes. if they show the government they spent $80 billion on R&D, they get almost all of it back.
This thing had no hardware component. there was no widespread adoption or datacenter investment. this is simply not true.
if he had lost $80 billion, the board wouldve fired him. facebook pays their engineers good money compared to others, but they dont pay that well.
This thing had no hardware component. there was no widespread adoption or datacenter investment. this is simply not true.
if he had lost $80 billion, the board wouldve fired him. facebook pays their engineers good money compared to others, but they dont pay that well.
SlimySnake
Flashless at the Golden Globes
Nah, thats way too high. Software engineers make a lot but not that much. its around $200-400k max. they were paying $300k post covid but all those guys are laid off and starting salaries are back to normal. as normal as it can be for silicon valley. now you will get hired around $200k and the potential is to go up to $400k but they will make you redundant and replace you well before that.
they do pay better than google and other tech firms. but its not a million.
SlimySnake
Flashless at the Golden Globes
So 15k employees in 5 years gave us these graphics?
We know now that all 3,000 rockstar developers work on one game at a time. they started dev on GTA6 after shipping RDR2 in 2018. So 3k developers working 8 years got us this:
Zuckerberg is lying.
Pejo
Member
Ironic thing is that I think a product like Metaverse will be the future, in like 20+ years when the tech matures and the adoption rate is much higher. Then again, I also thought Playstation Home was the future of gaming, having mixed lobbies where you could jump in and out of any game, etc.
So maybe I'm just an idiot.
So maybe I'm just an idiot.
Not salary alone, I laid it out.
poppabk
Cheeks Spread for Digital Only Future
$80 billion is the entire Meta labs. They have been spending billions on R&D for virtual offices and conference rooms and shit like that. They probably burned a bunch of money on content for the metaverse but not $10's of billions
StreetsofBeige
Gold Member
They needed something beyond VR games to prop up VR headsets. Since Meta is a social media company, the thinking was the general public wants more tech. And VR at the time was supposed to be the new thing. It would convert FB, Instagram and Whatsapp users from boring text messages and posts to buying a headset. It would be a social media extension where you can chat and hang out with people like it's a VR version of Second Life/Miiverse but looks like Minecraft. So instead of people quickly coming and going posting messages, Zuck thought he could rake in the bucks with hardware and constant advertising and monetizing from people wearing a VR goggle for hours a day.
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LyricalShrike
Member
A minimum calculation for employment costs(taxes, insurance, etc) in the US is 1.3 x salary. Benefits, incentives, and other overhead(they need to work somewhere) push the number even higher. Easily north of $500k.
uncreativename
Gold Member
I have no idea what that even is tbh.
Spyxos
Member
But isnt it like the main reason to be around?
StueyDuck
Member
Meta's whole approach to the "metaverse' and Oculus in general, with apps/games/hardware, was just a blunder from day one.
constantly locking out content from other users and headsets, forcing integration into platforms they don't want (Facebook account for headsets and metaverse content), and even locking out their own older headsets eventually, the absolute worst way to handle this sort of rollout of hardware/software.
They should have come out as open source (or at least much more SDK friendly), backwards compatible and willing to integrate.
Instead, they played the closed garden card and just made it more and more closed as time went on and guess what... Poof! It's gone because no one wants to buy in and get fucked a year later.
constantly locking out content from other users and headsets, forcing integration into platforms they don't want (Facebook account for headsets and metaverse content), and even locking out their own older headsets eventually, the absolute worst way to handle this sort of rollout of hardware/software.
They should have come out as open source (or at least much more SDK friendly), backwards compatible and willing to integrate.
Instead, they played the closed garden card and just made it more and more closed as time went on and guess what... Poof! It's gone because no one wants to buy in and get fucked a year later.
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Heimdall_Xtreme
Hermen Hulst Fanclub's #1 Member
With that money they could have built hospitals or schools...
And thank God it was a disaster... Facebook has already done enough damage to humanity...
And thank God it was a disaster... Facebook has already done enough damage to humanity...
SentientStone
Member
Why does no one like PS Home? 
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Pagusas
Elden Member
Yep. This is 10000% creative accounting. All big companies do it, but this is to the extreme
Haint
Member
He poached all of Reality Labs key talent from other companies with outlandish salaries and benefits so the average cost per head is wildly inflated compared to industry norms.
mopspear
Member
Zuck didn't get tricked into thinking Second Life would be really fun when he was in high school like I did. I wouldn't have wasted this much money if I was in charge. If I was in charge, I would have bought land in Africa and started my own country. UH OH! There's uranium in the rocks! Time to make this money back!
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Bert Big Balls
Gold Member
HAHA get CUCKED, ZUCC!
Bert Big Balls
Gold Member
Honestly agreed. I used to be so into technology but I'm finding myself giving less of a fuck as the years go by. Tech douches these days are insufferable.
Sinozen
Member
It just amazes me how out of touch Mark and the higher ups at Meta are. If they had just used their own products you could have figured out it wasn't panning out. You didn't need any statistics or any of that bullshit.
Horizons never stood a chance against VR Chat either and I know they havent spent close to that number producing that game.
Horizons never stood a chance against VR Chat either and I know they havent spent close to that number producing that game.
This is ultimately the biggest issue with corporations (and media, including video game companies) across the board right now: having absolutely ZERO fucking clue how to actually appeal to consumers.
They just come out with very inoffensive, half-baked, corporate-driven slop and just throw up their arms when nobody gives a shit about it. There's no "cool" factor to it. Metaverse always just looked like extremely sanitized and monetized VRChat to me, and VRChat is already a circus show of an experience. I had an Oculus Quest 2 and I never even bothered to try it.
I am not some douchey pseudo-intellectual anti-capitalist, but it is definitely true that a lot of investors are just being completely complacent throwing money around at these moronic companies with moronic leadership to keep them from their consequences. 30 years ago, if companies were leading like how they did now, they would all be bankrupt, and the executives wouldn't be able to find work again. They completely lost sense of how to actually make people want their shit.
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Lucie Goosey
Member
This could have gone towards improving the real world, but instead it's just thrown into the digital wind. Our society is broken. I think I need to get off Facebook
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WhamBamThankYouMaam
Member
Their movie theatre thing was...fun to visit as in a couple of minutes onceor twice to see what it looked like. I understood that some people had it as a place to actually have conversations there. During covid I saw people in various ai chats, and I assume in countries with lock down it was a good outlet.
Never been much for random ai voice in vr myself though, I just thought it was cool to see vr in action but I never stayed. I really never udnerstood the point of Horizon. I thinkl I investigated how to launch it once, then never again. Never even started it.
Never been much for random ai voice in vr myself though, I just thought it was cool to see vr in action but I never stayed. I really never udnerstood the point of Horizon. I thinkl I investigated how to launch it once, then never again. Never even started it.
StreetsofBeige
Gold Member
I faintly remember articles or videos where Apple does the same product/marketing tactic.
They come up with cool stuff, but it might even be that great of a product really. But if you jam enough money into style assuming the loyalists will eat it up it'll be a smash hit based on cool factor and branding alone.
efyu_lemonardo
May I have a cookie?
Speculative value is indeed a strange notion.
Pasta la Vista
Member
It's not. It found its own niche with vtubers and with VR chat cam girls. Porn.
StreetsofBeige
Gold Member
The first big run of VR was that $100 Samsung thing where you put your cellphone in it. Surprisingly it sold 5M units.
Doesn't matter how many Oculus or Valve VR have sold, it'll aways be a niche product with shallow games. Ya, you can use it for other things too I guess, but the key thing has always been games. And unless it's changed a lot lately, it always seems like the same batch of demo-ish or $20 sword slashing or pretend gunner game.
ForAcademicPurposes
Gold Member
Something something money laundering.
Halcyon
Member
I love my Quest 3. As long as a game has teleport options I don't get motion sickness. The feeling of presence you get in these games like Ghost Town and RE4vr you can't get in any other experience. Me and my daughter play mini golf, ping pong, and all sorts of two player escape room style games.
Horizons is essentially for kids and just a Roblox clone but I'm a big fan of VR. I'm watching Invincible on like a 300 inch tv floating in the middle of my living room right now.
Horizons is essentially for kids and just a Roblox clone but I'm a big fan of VR. I'm watching Invincible on like a 300 inch tv floating in the middle of my living room right now.