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Facebook & Metaverse

Mark Zuckerberg has been screwing over the Metaverse lately — and it's been costly. On Monday, Facebook offered new financial perspective on the cost of building this digital world: The project will need at least $10 billion this year alone, according to the latest profit and spending forecasts Facebook provided investors in its third-quarter earnings report. That number is likely to increase in the coming years, Zuckerberg told analysts on a conference call. In Zuckerberg's view, the "Metaverse," a cutting-edge Silicon Valley concept that posits that future social networks will rely on augmented and virtual reality technologies, represents a way out of Facebook's existing problems: Facebook could be bigger than Facebook. Stronger than ever, with over 3 billion users worldwide. But Facebook's waning popularity among young people over the past decade and growing antitrust concerns surrounding Facebook will make it difficult for the company to simply acquire any upstarts in the industry. So Facebook had to find a way to build a new service of its own to help attract younger users.

$10 billion to build Metaverse worlds This $10 billion annual spend is a new revelation, but Facebook has been pretty candid about its ambitions to build the Metaverse. Zuckerberg may tie those hopes more directly to his company. He's reportedly considering changing the company's name to reflect its new focus on the Metaverse, a move that could be announced at Connect on Thursday.

Facebook already offers several virtual reality headsets through the Occulus brand it acquired in 2014, and has launched a beta version of a platform called Horizon Worlds, which is available only by invitation. With this platform, the company hopes to attract users who are eager to design virtual worlds and items for the Metaverse.

Zuckerberg told analysts: "If you're in the metaverse, you're going to need digital clothing, digital tools, and different experiences. Our goal is to help the metaverse reach 1 billion people and billions of dollars in the next 10 years." business.” However, Zuckerberg warned that building “this underlying platform is going to be a long road,” noting that Wall Street expects Reality Labs to lose money for years to come.

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Future Prospects of the Metaverse

It's not just Facebook that's attracting attention to the metaverse concept, and it's been around for a long time. (Sci-fi writer Neil Stephenson coined the term in 1992.) Fundamentally, virtual reality has proven difficult to commercialize. Occulus developed the first virtual reality headset more than a decade ago, but its first version of the headset after it was acquired by Facebook was expensive, clumsy, and didn't have any popular applications. Competitors such as Samsung and Google have also begun to try, although their headsets are mainly connected to smartphones, and these smartphones are not powerful enough to produce a fully immersive experience. Magic Leap, a Florida-based startup that raised $4 billion over nine years, managed to launch only one iteration of the headset, which ultimately flopped.

Facebook has now filed nearly 1,500 patents related to AR and VR, while Samsung, Microsoft and Sony have each filed nearly 2,000 such patents.

With Facebook raking in about $30 billion in net profit to fund the growth of the Metaverse, Zuckerberg seemed to have no worries."We believe that Metaverse will become the successor of the mobile Internet. We think it will unleash a bigger creative economy than it does today."