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Comment by MBCook | Hacker News Reader

They spent $9,000,000,000 on the Metaverse in the first 9 months of this year.

That’s $1 billion a month.

They are currently peaking at 200k monthly users (who may only spend 5m a month). Honestly that’s way higher than I’d have guessed. I wonder what the number would be if you filtered to people who spent over 5 hours or logged on at least twice a week?

Anyway that’s $5,000 per user per month. $60,000 per user per year.

You could easily find people who would sit in the Metaverse all day every day for less than that because it would pay more than their job.

What an insane burn rate. On a product even the product’s developers don’t want to use.

And this is the future of the company?

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Spending 1 billion a month on something I still perceive as a video game is lunacy. FB could practically purchase the entire games industry at these investment levels. This would be the production budget of 2 Rockstar titles per month.

... which begs the question, where is it actually going?

They are selling a lot of headsets. Are they losing money on them?

The new ones are $1500 I would hope not lol

They have sold millions of the $300 ones

Yes, they were losing money on them. They recently raised the prices, it's not clear if they're still losing money or not though.

They should have bought Roblox … they certainly have better games and metaverse I.e 3D virtual worlds capability.

They still can.

I don’t know. After the recent scrutiny of the Instagram acquisition and whether it should have been allowed (or undone), it might not be realistic to get it through government scrutiny.

> FB could practically purchase the entire games industry at these investment levels

Games are a metaverse that people actually want to use.

FB's metaverse? Who knows.

Horizon Worlds (or whatever it's called) is probably among the biggest failures in the history of business.

Any sane shareholder would oust Zuckerberg at this point, but sadly the only vote that matters is his.

I have a Quest 2 for a year now and keep trying from time to time to download the app to experience it. It's not available in my region. If that's not pure metaverse irony, I'm not sure what is.

Every person gets to vote by holding or not holding shares. A massive amount of people have voted against Zuckerberg and metaverse by dumping stock

No amount of stock selloff can get Zuckerberg fired. He has absolute control over the company.

A few days ago I asked this exact same question. And I have been told by HN comments that in the US he would still be sued even if the shareholders have non-voting rights and Zukerberg has absolute control of the company.

Yes, but those lawsuits are rare and require them to show malfeasance of some kind. They can't sue him for being stupid.

Right. But why do I care if I have no involvement with the company? Let's of people have majority voting rights in lots of companies. This fact doesn't seem to matter to anyone in any other scenario.

I honestly wonder what they are actually spending that money on. $9 billion? I guess that is 4,000 programmers, marketers, designers making $250K/month would use it all up.

I've only seen bits and pieces of the graphics, though, from what I've seen, they look pretty horrible for that kind of money.

Most of it is likely being spent on the backend pieces that support delivery of the content. That being said, it's still an insane amount of money for something that really needs to wait a few decades for hardware to catch up.

Everyone got excited with VR, myself included. I bought a VR rig a few years ago and it's fun, but it's got it's own limitations.

My experience with VR:

First year of ownership - 400ish hours in VR.

Second year of ownership - Maybe 100 hours in VR.

Third year of ownership - My wife and I break it out to play beat saber a couple of times a year.

At $1B a month, that's approximately on par with the GDP of an island nation like Sint Maarten or Grenada.

They should have acquired VRChat and Second Life and merged the technology stacks into one experience. The fact that they didn't do this implies that they have no idea what they are even doing.

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