Bitcoin Forum

Meta has burned $15 billion trying to build the metaverse — and nobody's saying exactly where the money went (https://www.businessinsider.com/meta-lost-15-billion-building-the-metaverse-reality-labs-money-2022-10?international=true&r=US&IR=T)



I always thought that Metaverse is a stupid idea, it can only succeed when VR is massively popular, which it is not right now. Zuck is trying to put a cart before the horse.

If Facebook, with all this budget and materials, has not yet been able to build a good metaverse model, then what about these coins that are trying to scam investors with 100k ICO, Bounty, .....
this industry and Web V3 is for multi billion companies more than something small businesses can build.

I don't know how long I haven't heard of the progress of their project which I think has stalled in the last few months. If I look at crypto-based metaverse projects that seem to be fading, I don't see any hope that Meta will achieve the same success and fate as Libra in the past.
On the other hand, Facebook is the only platform that is becoming increasingly unclear on its orientation.

The Metaverse at large isn't a failed project and those that has key into this are also working tiredlessly to bring out something unique from it but i must confess that it is not what is as simple as we all taught, i think we are only on the ideological stage and more resea needs to bebdone in other to bring this ideas into practical reality, which will obviously take time, money and efforts, the Facebook Meta are also trying on their own but it's not what we should expect to into live like this soon, but time will definitely bring to unfold what it has through Metaverse and those that set in first will make a lifetime history with it, let's keep the fingers crossed and see who comes in first.

No sympathies for Zuckerberg. He is the same idiot who tried to steal the idea of cryptocurrency and tried to build his own version (Diem/Libra). He spent quite a lot of money on it, and even sent David Marcus to a senate hearing to defend this coin. Metaverse is yet another shitty idea, which will bring Zuckerberg close to bankruptcy. I guess he is feeling insecure due to the decreasing popularity of Facebook. But it is natural. Facebook achieved growth at the expense of MySpace and Orkut 10-15 years ago. Now time has come for Facebook to undergo the same treatment.

You've got to wonder where such a big sum of money really ends up and how the breakdown actually looks. Whether it is mostly spent on arranging server contracts, hiring super computers to do some sort of modelling, building up data centers, or how much staffing is allocated to this project. It makes a super convenient way to offset taxes by reallocating budgets or hiding certain costs within this research & development which might actually benefit other companies within the Meta group. The more they spend on this project, the more they can write off profits in places like Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp - I hope the regulators are paying close attention to the accounts.

I think Facebook's metaverse spending spree is probably more of an existential issue than one that'll be fixed soon, they might even find more things to attempt to invent in the meantime while making themselves even less efficient.

They seemed to have problems going down the route most other big tech firms did by selling cloud computing (I think this was particularly because of how slow Facebook's servers have always been). The metaverse might go like those games available on Facebook too (messenger particularly). Google then got instant playable games that didn't ping all your friends who played the same game with your score whenever you played it...

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Most games can now have tiny teams and fairly small budgets. I've played some good games that have a core team of about 80 devs.

For the biggest mmo rpgs I can think of:
Final fantasy 14 has 400 devs
World of warcraft is estimated to be 100-300 people

I think these VR experience builds will become cheaper the more they're built though too. Most of what's needed for AR and VR is already out there - I bought a game on steam back in 2017 and was given a VR version of the game (I didn't play it that way though because I don't think it'd have been that much different).
There will likely be the first few attempts at the metaverse before it comes a lot cheaper to produce though (unless someone like unity tries to take it on straight away). Films also became more expensive to produce somehow even though a lot of their editing and production costs became cheaper (mainly because of the cameras they need iirc) this could be something that happens with the metaverse too. 

Just making it appear like they are building something. Well they have something they call  Reality Labs that is something to spend on.
VR devices is really expensive and according to the article which I consider a clue to what they are doing, they are building something maybe a VR device that will not make us look like an alien when we put it on our heads.

But maybe Zuck really knows what he is doing after all he bought Instagram that turned out to be the best investment too.

Completely disagree with you comparing facebook to other tokens that started thru ICO or IPO. Facebook's company may have one of the largest company to start something on the crypto industry however it doesn't guarantee that they could succeed to anything they plan to.
Each and every startup crypto has different usecase which is why some of them failed and some of them end up a success. You don't need to have a multi billion company for your project to succeed but rather be able to follow through your plans and roadmap.

Growing up in and participating in Silicon Valley tech long before the internet, this is how it goes. Small team of very bright people get together and make a dream happen. It's exciting and knew. then the company get's too big too fast and is no longer agile and innovative. It's struggles to force innovation and buckles under it's own weight.

Zuck has bloated woke pig that won't sing anymore. I think VR/Meta is a something looking for an application.

I think it's dumb as NFT's.

Its obvious that he made a gamble to jump into this technology so early. But this could be a massive gain as well. When other companies will be thinking about metaverse his company will already have tons of experience and staffed developed. So when the adoption will begin they will be ahead of everyone else in the field that time. Only time can tell he was right or wrong.

Another example of a project that came to the market before it became really in demand. An attempt to become a "pioneer" turned out to be somewhat unsuccessful.
But a negative experience is actually the MOST VALUABLE. It will be used by the players of this market, it will be used by Meta itself, and it will definitely be used by those who build a similar business, most likely taking a pause in order to more accurately assess the market and the prospects for such solutions. I will say one thing - this failure will save many even more money, and the Meta and Zuckerberg will receive the most valuable, albeit insanely expensive, experience.

That’s a lot of money for a project that didn’t exist yet, META is really cooking something here and they are preparing for something big. We might see them failed but I think they are serious about this Metaverse and they will not lose that much if this is not worth it. Transparency might be the only problem here, but as an investors let’s just hope that they are doing good behind the scene because for sure, when that project goes live many will adopt.

though we can't say for sure about the future of what they are cooking right now, but they are maybe doing something behind the curtains because that amount is not small and for sure, they need to get it from somewhere. i don't think they will just let it go and call it a day of losses. we may be surprised in the near future what they will be offering here to their users. remember, as of now, they have 2.9B+ active users. that's a lot of market to explore with. so that $15B would be easy for them to get back once they launched whatever they are cooking here.

Investors have the right to know this and usually companies needs to disclose this to the authority and I’m sure they are not doing any illegal here, maybe it’s a pure preparation for the big events ahead. META changed their name for nothing, they are doing something that can blow our minds in the future, we should already anticipate this and hope that they are doing this for the benefits of many. Metaverse is still here, it may take more time but let’s hope that it’s worth it.

I have read and somewhat followed that progress. But it seems that even they've got a huge budget for the project, they're quite late on it during the hype.

Everything has been down and it's not a good time to launch it. There's something wrong to those people behind working with their Metaverse project but that's not probably a thing to them because they're looking at it as a long term project and feature.

We can have that thought that changing the name of their company has a huge part of it and just telling everyone that they're ready. But, the timing isn't that perfect at all.

From what little I've seen on Youtube (mostly that video of Zuck's lifeless avatar giving the grand tour of the Metaverse) it does indeed seem stupid, even for hardcore tech-heads, gamers, and/or whoever else might be interested in VR innovation. 

I know it's been a long time since Zuckerberg "created" Facebook, but maybe he's let things go to his head and thinks he can create demand for something like that.  But whatever the case may be, it sounds like Meta investors aren't happy with the black hole those billions of dollars are going into.  I mean Jesus, that's a lot of money for any company to be spending on R&D, and if it's not clear to shareholders exactly what the money is being spent on....there's a big investor-relations problem there.

Let that company and all its projects die, and the quicker the better.  Facebook/Meta is just one Big Brother out of several that needs to be blown out of the water.

With that kind of funds, they can easily create hype and beside, they didn't launch any yet and maybe they also understand that the market situation right now it not a good timing to introduce such project.

That Billions of funds will not be put in waste, I'm sure META is prepared for this and they already anticipate the government intervention once they launch this project. Maybe they still need more time before they disclose any information with regards to this one.

Its easy to spend that much money when considering the price of the hardware concerned, to create that VR area is quite a large taskload.   Add in software and development costs and I guess 15bn is only the beginning.    I think like most great advancements it will come from the bottom not via large spending, they might do better to start simple and back in the day that meant wireframe type graphics not the full featured ultra realism we are used to.
  When establishing a concept they need to start with the basics even a large company like this, I'd like to think an indie developer stumbles across the best avenue to advancement that really keys with peoples perceptions.

I'm very doubtful about the "metaverse", but who knows, maybe I'm wrong!   :-\

Facebook's cancelled cryptocurrency projects libra and diem were better than anything metaverse has to offer.

Meta hasn't shown much invention or innovation in its attempt to reinvent the internet. There isn't anything new they bring to the table.

Those who follow finance and business know exactly where the money went. The same precedent has been an ongoing theme for other large US corporations for years. The abrupt rebranding to metaverse without much marketing or promotion. The considerable redistribution of funds, despite lacking a good proof of concept or tech demo. The buggy lo fi rollout. Everything about it shouldn't be too hard to figure out. Even without knowing the past history of financial engineering and massive debt restructuring occurring in brand name american corporations.

I doubt that this failure alone could become Facebook's undoing, but it could be a step towards it. Facebook is still too big to fail, but if it continues to be mismanaged and competition would provide better alternatives to online socializing, it could decline significantly in 10-15 years.


Maybe 15 billion is not a massive sum for a company like Meta, but the fact that it's spent on overly-ambitious project with low chance of success and in an untransparent way, that's certainly a bad sign for investors.

I think the reason Zuckerberg is so adamant on building the metaverse as soon as possible is because most likely he wants to monopolize not only the software but the hardware aspect as well, right now everyone can use his platforms on any smartphone as those devices are widely available all over the world, but if he can create a metaverse ahead of everyone while VR devices are not as popular he could create his own VR equipment monopolizing that market as well, we will have to see if I am right but at least that is what I believe he is thinking.

It seems to me Zuckerberg has this mentality that he could build something even grander after building Facebook. Facebook was indeed a huge success but it can't happen all the time, and nobody could simply build one huge success after another. To a certain extent, success as big as Facebook in the field of technology is unpredictable. It just happens.

This man is ambitious. It's not necessarily bad, of course, but it could cost you a lot and the risk is high. I remembered how amazing a vision Libra was. And he, in fact, already managed to bring the largest companies in the world together to create the Libra Association. But then, for some reasons, it didn't materialize. He, then, went on to attempt to create another grand stablecoin project that also didn't make it.

And now his grand metaverse vision has already cost him a lot but it remains less promising until now. It's becoming more and more likely that it would share the same fate with Libra and Diem. This doesn't look good for the publicly-listed company.

That's called "timing the markets"

Like you said VR might get popular in the future even though I don't see that happening but the time is definitely not now.

The thing is Zuck ran out of creativity. He bought Instagram and Whatsapp and these were his last good moves with FB. Actually it is whatsapp and instagram keeping the whole thing alive. FB itself is a damn cemetery. Yes some people use it but it is far from its former glory especially now they are censoring and banning people left and right just because they used some curse words. Wtf is this place? Even your local high school has more freedom than facebook.

I thought so myself, this metaverse project makes no sense at all. Why would anybody use it in the first place? Even if everybody had a VR setup at home, would you really be using the Zuckerberg metaverse or a different company? I am pretty sure there is no way he is going to turn the project around. So much money invested in that project and nothing to show for, the graphics are bad and there are no active users. At this point it would make sense to abandon the project and write it off, maybe get some tax benefits for failed developments. It's one thing to not have enough VR setups with customers, another thing is the brand name of Zuckerberg. I don't think there will be another success company like Facebook it its good days now from Zuckerberg. Many customers are very sceptical when it comes to another social media experience from Zuckerberg.

This meta project has been met with a lot of ridicule because of some leaked images that appeared on social media but it is not enough to say that their attempt will fail. It's a billion dollar project and Zuckerberg has succeeded with Facebook so I think he will have his plans and ambitions. He's trying to create a technology for the future, if it's successful and popular, I believe people will use it so I won't pray for him to fail like everyone else, I'm simply is to monitor its development.

Wow, big news Meta is going to add legs in their avatars, Its really laughable that a huge company with big funding can't even develop an already existing features in the VR world. Mark should just hire modders in the gaming space because they have done better things for free.

Mark Zuckerberg Reveal Next-Gen Avatars With Legs!:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njvp-E8gzqA

Apart from having some leaked images we shouldn't just scoff at it,
I think Mark Zuckerberg didn't play around in making the project considering that it also requires a lot of capital,
that's right it's better to follow and monitor the progress of the Meta project

$15 billion seems like a lot but Facebook/Meta has a huge source of income to burn. It was from the social media ads on Facebook for publishers. Cause of that, they are willing to push their Metaverse bullcrap, sinking more money into it without any split second to doubt think.
What, do you expect them to stop after investing $15 billion? We'll see more of Metaverse one way or another from Facebook.

They can cover up all those loses since Facebook still the top social media platform which generate then a billions of dollars. And that amount is I think they can afford to lose since this is part of their investment which if they succeed then they are the first who can do it then it will surely give them a thousand folds return of profits.

The concept of Metaverse is way ahead of it's time. The current level of technology can't handle the idea of a complex and fully functional Metaverse. Perhaps after 10 or 15 years we might witness the vast adoption of the Metaverse. I don't know what would be the main utility of this project. How the metaverse could make our lives better? By escaping from reality? ;D
I'm not a fan of the whole idea of virtual reality and metaverse, but I can't stop the innovation. The human technological progress can be heading towards weird directions. The future is going to suck for sure. ;D
Billionaires like Zuckerberg and Elon Musk seem disconnected from the actual problems of the human kind in the real world.

Thats a crazy bet played by Mark and he could get into lawsuite trouble one more time after facebook. Why is that he is always being such jack when things are always in right direction for him? He is whole and sole target of many peeps when it comes to something bad in association with his project or facebook itself. He has lot of money but he always kinda overspend on stupid things or improper managements. I know he must be having big team behind his decisions with white collars but man, results ain't proving anything right here?

Metaverse, though futuristic many companies are already into it and bringing up some realities to it. They are doing this from the scratch but this guy with pocket full of money and 15 billions bucks on single project? He could have made whole star trek mission in metaverse with that much money.

Interesting to follow developments after being burned $ 15 billion, of course the team already has a deep calculation so that it dares to be burned $ 15 billion, and if it can be successful of course there will be many developers who will imitate techniques like this.

I am not sympathetic with rich guys who are shareholders of Meta and that the company is doing something shady with the money without really providing many results. But I am happy that Metaverse thing isn't working out so far. Companies like this, tech giants, already know too much about us and have too much control. They shouldn't have more unless we're moving to a dystopian future. Instead of burning the money on trying to get even more private data to sell to companies to make people waste more money, though, these billions could've been spent on some charity, social, medical, educational initiative, so that is a shame.

They can create hype and attention to it. But this proves that they can't go against the bear market because their project didn't do well at this time.

And they've started first with other projects that have made them spend money already, AFAIK that's a million dollar budget but they've changed their goal and abandoned it.

If you mean a decent profit to stand on its own feet then yes. But a thousand folds return of profits from the initial investment in Metaverse? Big doubt.
The thing about Metaverse is how ridiculous it was for advertising publishers to pay a fee to rent a space in the cyberland. But to do that, that cyberland needs a lot of traffics from people's avatar, in turn, a massive amount of users on Metaverse. See the problem here? Facebook's Metaverse has none of that right now. More money is being put in, with zero profit return for at least a few years unless they have more users jump in their Metaverse craps.

I remember Libra, but for some reason diem is only ringing a low-volume bell in my head.  Anyway, if you're comparing those two against whatever their Metaverse turns out to be, I'm not so sure the cryptos were better ideas or not.  Maybe for Facebook, but not for the general public--but I guess we'll never know since the US government wouldn't let them get off the ground.

Am I reading between the lines correctly here?  Are you saying Meta might be pulling an Enron or something illegal of that nature, like accounting fraud, quarter-stuffing, and all that crap that corporations do to make their stock look attractive to big investors and/or line the pockets of the corporations' executives' pockets?

I honestly hadn't thought of that, since Meta/Facebook hasn't shown any evidence of doing that in the past (or at least I haven't picked up on it).  Then again, a lot of financial chicanery doesn't get detected until the house of cards comes tumbling down--just like in Enron's case.  Don't know if you're right or wrong here, but it'll be interesting to see what comes of all this money Meta is throwing into the black hole.

I belong to the same league. Metaverse and NFT - both are stupid ideas! In this era of scientific advancements, keeping people busy into an non-existent world, can bring disaster. Meta is seeing that looking at their sliding stock price.

Elon was so right about this. He said it is a marketing buzzword to create curiosity. But once the curiosity is satisfied, people will not head back to such world because it's not a value proposition to them.

Entire concept of a metaverse, is going to fail Miserably.

I quite applaud Zuck's belief in the future of metaverse technology, he targets that in the next 15 years his project will be successful and META becomes a leader in metaverse technology, even though it looks very ambitious but he is making bets and he says he is ready with all possibilities that happen in the future.

This is the mentality of a successful people. They won't just stop after they create a working product but they will always try their best to improve it more because they know that once they stop, other competitors can beat them. This is a great mentality imo but I think there are people who will hate him for this.

They will say that mark z is only wasting his money and effort for this and the metaverse project that he is trying to create is still not good enough. They can also link this to other failed projects that they built on the past like libra coin but who knows, this one might be a success? He is only showing that failure must not stop us for trying again.

Exactly. These guys are as nefarious as they can be, and they are doing a lot of things that most of us will not comprehend. They can create these projects and just weather the loss just because they have a lot of safety nets in place. Loads of futuristic tech projects have spawned over time, and only a few things have been really beneficial to the plight of us who can only imagine what it's like to have that amount of money.

I think we can recognize that something like the metaverse will be part of our lives someday, what we do not know is if that time is now, Zuckerberg is making a prediction and he believes now is the right time for the technology to be deployed, is he correct? No one knows for sure but he is willing to invest a fortune to make his vision a reality, however if he is wrong not only he will lose all of that money but he will give valuable information to whoever wants to do this for free and instead he will help someone else to make his vision to come true, so he is taking a huge risk no matter how we look at it.

The brave step from Facebook to make Meta can be valuable, but I prefer if Facebook users get Airdrops of course by doing things like Airdrops, I still remember the beginning of Paypal giving free $ 50 for Facebook users.

My Issue with this is the amount Meta is said to be spending on the development of metaverse. Actually sounds like they're gambling or taking big risk. It's important to be certain before making that kind of bet otherwise start small to experiment and learn in the course of development

Business in general is a risky thing and it is not for nothing that it is said that only the winner drinks champagne. Few people will remember the predecessors of losers who tried to bring the idea to life, but the winner gets fame and privileges and most importantly all the cream. There are many ideas that are floating in the air and seem to have to find their embodiment in physical reality, but so far this is constantly hindered by something. It may be recalled that Zuckerberg himself was not a pioneer in social networks, but he managed to ride the wave and, thanks to successful actions, succeed. But business does not like those who stand still and try to use old recipes in new changed conditions, and therefore it is commendable and quite understandable that the Meta corporation itself and Zuckerberg in particular are trying to find new horizons and a new point of growth, since financial resources allow such experiments. As for the topic of transparency of such investments, which investors are worried about, I would like to say the following. There are some secrets of the business kitchen that no one should be privy to, especially competitors, and if there is an opportunity to hide something, then any such organization will not fail to take advantage of it.

Honestly the Meta-verse to me felt/feels very much like the whole NFT market craze. Completely over hyped and well ahead of itself. I look at both NFT art Meta-verse as something that I can’t believe so many people were buying in to especially with Meta as we really just don’t know where things are heading with. Like what is this nonsense we seem to be 100 years too easily for. I dunno, I never got it either.

That is understandable, he is making a bet that if he spends insane amount of money into this metaverse technology, one day he will be at the forefront, basically be bitcoin of metaverse, and that will give them both a lot of money, but also what matters to them is users, which could give them millions, even maybe over a billion users once again.

However, reality is that metaverse is not that simple, even if he keeps on trying to do the best he could possibly do, he will probably fail and that is going to hurt them financially. This is not a simple task, this is something that is gigantic and needs to evolve with the technological improvements we have, and cannot be loved right away.

Quite surprised to see more comments are negative about the technology, but myself I beleive it is really possible but not going to happen in very short time like in 18 months, it will take atleast 5 years to roll out the beta and the development will go on for years. Why Mark started too early is to establish he wants to take the first seat so more profits than back seats but as far as the investors concern towards is understandable but they took the bet so have to accept the outcome as well.

The difference is, all those "metaverse" things we have seen on crypto is just roblox type of idiotic stuff that people fell for and lost a quite good amount of money, and couldn't have been built any good at all, it was definitely a bad replica of what should have been, just to make some profit.

On the other hand, meta is not doing it for the money, in fact they have lost more money trying to build it so far than what all those projects are worth right now combined. Which means that they really want to do this for the technology of it, and not for the money they could make, or maybe money plays a role but not the first thing in their mind.

It might be stupid idea but if you corner the market first then you have much better starting position. I like you anology but imagine that you have a cart that is so much ahead that getting horse later won't matter.
15 billion is a gamble but a gamble that might pay off 100x over.

Meta development will take a long time and based on the news said for the next 10 years, they will develop new technology about metaverse by using VR to access the 3D simulation world. Despite the negative news about the clarity of metaverse development and the amount of funds used for the metaverse, many people may not know that Meta has released a new VR device called Oculus Quest Pro (http://ttps://www.oculus.com/blog/meta-quest-pro-price-release-date/) this year. We can assess the Meta development process as potentially completed in less than 10 years, so we must think positively to provide support to Meta to complete its work.

I think he is rushing this too much and if his stock holders do not see any results then I would not be surprised if at some point in time he is replaced as the CEO of Meta and then his vision is abandoned, so not only he needs to make this a reality he needs to do it with resources that while they may seem to be huge for people like us from the point of view of developing something so groundbreaking the funds may not be anywhere near enough to what he actually needs.

No matter what how great they are now and how much successful they are now but we can't deny failures are also part of this path even he said about this on one of his interviews. But personally I think the technology has potential and the market that is why he jumped into the development of the technology even he changed the name of parent company to meta to become one of its kind in the near future.

But he is burning billions without a product in sight! Metaverse as we can see it in some promo videos is still far away, and 18 months or 5 years is a pretty long time... he will probably burn even more billions until that point! I don't think that people are negative, it's just reality. For metaverse you will need VR, and how many people have and actively use it?! And do we really need it? How many people are really interested in the metaverse? Do we really need some other reality like the one we can see in some movies?

I guess the metaverse can be interesting, but let's keep it within some limits! We also need to stay humans who need some real touch!

I am guessing that it's not directly cash, most of the time when calculating these type of things they do count things that are not directly money, but worths money, such as man hours, which means if 100 people worked on it for 6 months then you calculate all the cost of those employees at the same time, and that could be calculated into it.

I doubt that it would be 15 billion already, that just doesn't make sense, what could they really spend that 15 billion on, think about it item by item, doesn't really sound like a true price. Maybe they are just showing it as a cost to pay less taxes I don't know. But in the end, if they can achieve it one day, it would be all worth it.

Of course not directly cash, but worth of it. I admired Mark Zuckerberg as he is the one driving force of the future, the technology he envisioned and trying to make it a reality. He is in esting here,it means it is doable and achievable, just a matter of time.

I guess people don't fully understand what a metaverse is, it seems like they are just looking at projects labeled as metaverse that are active in the crypto and they don't know that the metaverse has been in development for a long time and is heavily invested by tech companies. I also think the metaverse will be an important trend in the future as this technology becomes more and more popular and VR devices become cheaper, people will realize how useful it really is.

With burning up to $ 15 billion, it will make news that continues to be viral and becomes a promotion that they are serious about the project, but whether this strategy can be successful, I'm sure it still needs time to prove Meta can be accepted by investors.

The great science fiction writer Roger Zelazny wrote that at a certain stage of development, technology is already indistinguishable from magic.

Is Zuckerberg's Metaverse Like Magic?  In my opinion - no!  

Watching the series House of the Dragon is much more interesting than testing Zuckerberg's Metaverse....

However, most likely the Metaverse will be created.  However, will it be created in the current decade?  I'm not sure.  It is possible that fundamentally new devices will be required for the successful functioning of this project.  

For example, devices using holography technology, as well as neurochips.  Until such devices have become widespread, it will not be possible to create the Metaverse.