“Metaverse is the future.” This phrase is often passed around in the crypto industry. Over the last couple of months, the metaverse has become a prominent topic of interest among mainstream firms. Move over them, governments across the globe have been pouring their funds into the space. So it wasn’t surprising that Meta [formerly Facebook] decided to take on the space. What’s surprising is that its metaverse division has been enduring a loss of about seven straight quarters.
The Mark Zuckerberg-led firm’s Reality Labs, the virtual reality and metaverse division endured losses of $2.8 billion. This was revealed in the Meta earnings call for the second quarter of 2022. The revenue of Reality Labs was $452 million. It should be noted that this division amassed $695 million in earnings during the first quarter.
As seen in the above image, the total revenue for the second quarter of 2022 was $28.82 billion.
Furthermore, the global economy took a major hit over the last couple of months.
Despite this downfall, Mark Zuckerberg the CEO of the firm remained immensely positive about the metaverse. During the call, Zuckerberg suggested that these losses weren’t surprising and would prolong for several years. He further assured that this would be until the metaverse becomes more mainstream and mature.
He further added,
“This is obviously a very expensive undertaking over the next several years. I’m confident that we’re going to be glad that we played an important role in building this.”
Meta and Apple to lock horns in the metaverse?
The entire globe seems to be in the race to the metaverse. South Korea, Dubai, and Japan seemed to be leading this race as of now. Zuckerberg, however, believes that Apple could pose as a prominent completion to Meta. He believes that both the companies were in a “very deep, philosophical competition.”
Zuckerberg further told his employees,
“This is a competition of philosophies and ideas, where they believe that by doing everything themselves and tightly integrating that they build a better consumer experience. And we believe that there is a lot to be done in specialization across different companies, and [that] will allow a much larger ecosystem to exist.”
Apple has reportedly been working on both VR as well as AR models. However, Zuckerberg believes that the future isn’t written here yet for the metaverse. Therefore, research seems to be their current priority.