Meta’s spottons for the moribund Metaverse
The Metaverse is practically deserted, yet Meta's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, persists in wanting to keep it alive through advertising (and layoffs). Facts, numbers and predictions
It will be a new world, they said. Indeed, one person said it above all: Mark Zuckerberg. The number one of Meta, owner of Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp , in 2021 already saw us all in his Metaverse, a universal and immersive virtual world facilitated by the use of viewers.
For months, however, the collapse began for all those who had believed in it and Meta, in particular, as Start also wrote, from the last quarter of 2020 to the spring of this year lost 30 billion dollars for the Reality Labs division , the one focused on the latest news in development and therefore also on the Metaverse.
However, Zuckerberg does not want to give up and, although the life of the Metaverse is hanging by a thread, Meta continues to advertise everywhere : online, on TV and on the radio. One of the latest appearances was made in the newsletter of the well-known and appreciated American newspaper Axios , in which he appears with two sponsored articles shortly after each other. Both concern the uses of the Metaverse in the medical field.
META'S SUPER ADVERTISEMENT AT THE METAVERSE
In the Axios newsletter, Meta invites doctors, future and otherwise, to practice in the Metaverse before intervening in the real world on real patients. “Across the world, millions of people are going blind due to lack of access to eye care. To help them, FundamentalVR and Orbis International have created a cataract surgery training system in the Metaverse. Surgeons can train as many times as necessary before working with real patients,” the advert reads.
“I can perform cataract surgery all the time in the Metaverse,” testifies a young doctor. “Today, doctors like Renee Badroe – continues the ad – are training in the Metaverse to help treat patients with limited access to eye care, honing their skills with FundamentalVR and Orbis International's immersive cataract training program.”
PAST AND FUTURE DISMISSALS AT META(VERSO)
However, all this publicity clashes with one of Meta's recent announcements. Last Tuesday, in fact, Reuters wrote that Meta was planning to fire the next day the employees of the unit of its Reality Labs division, dedicated to the Metaverse and focused on the creation of customized silicon.
Employees, the news agency says, were informed of the layoffs in a post on Meta's internal Workplace discussion forum late Tuesday. A company spokesperson "declined to comment on the plans" and Reuters was "unable to determine the extent of the cuts to the silicon unit, called Facebook Agile Silicon Team, or FAST" – which has about 600 employees .
FAST's restructuring has been expected since the spring, when Meta hired a new executive to lead the unit.
“If the cuts are deep – writes Reuters -, they could hinder Zuckerberg's plan to build augmented and virtual reality products that allow access to a set of immersive virtual worlds known as the 'Metaverse', in particular the AR glasses which, according to his predictions, they will 'redefine our relationship with technology'”.
But the layoffs at Meta are much broader. Since November 2022, the company has cut about 21,000 jobs , seeking to reassure investors about cost containment amid flagging revenue growth, high inflation and fears that Reality Labs was losing too much money.
In a statement released in March, Zuckerberg said that the majority of this year's layoffs would occur in the spring, but that "in a small number of cases, it may take until the end of the year to complete these changes." .
THE (NEGATIVE) RESULTS OF REALITY LABS
Early spring fears that the Reality Labs division was losing too much money were borne out in late July when the company reported an operating loss of $3.7 billion on revenue of $276 million in the second quarter, down compared to $339 million in the first quarter. Analysts interviewed by StreetAccount, and quoted byCNBC , expected Reality Labs to have a turnover of $421 million and operating losses of $3.5 billion.
REALITY LABS LOSSES AND PREDICTIONS
As the CNBC chart shows, the Reality Labs unit lost a total of $13.8 billion last year, despite posting revenue of $2.16 billion, partly due to sales of branded VR headsets Quest. In 2023, however, it lost approximately 7.7 billion dollars and, therefore, total losses amount to approximately 21.5 billion dollars from the beginning of 2022.
Also in July, Meta said in its earnings report that it expected Reality Labs' operating losses to increase "significantly over the course of the year due to continued product development efforts in augmented/virtual reality and investments to further scale the ecosystem”.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/innovazione/gli-spottoni-di-meta-per-il-metaverso-moribondo/ on Fri, 06 Oct 2023 09:45:27 +0000.