lel Peak players: 66k Money spent by Meta on VR to date: $69,000,000,000 Investment per player, presuming VRChat were the goal: one million, thirty four thousand, nine hundred and one and 68/100 dollars Facebook started playing around with VR in 2019. It is now 2025. By way of comparison, MBS announced the Mukaab on February 16, 2023 with a target date of completion of December 31, 2030. So. A year longer than Facebook has been building their VR empire... but the Mukaab (if they pull it off) will house 400,000 people. In real life. For 48 billion. (if they pull it off) Zuck knows that the more Facebook faces the Internet, the more traffic and money bleeds out. The whole point of Facebook is to silo the shit out of everything they do so they can control the ad dollars and the content but ultimately, Facebook has to be HTML compliant; it is, in the end, a website. Put that shit in VR and they can control everything. If they can make it a place you'd rather be than the real world they basically own reality. And if you're high on your own supply you read Snow Crash and Ready Player One and you say "but it won't be a dystopia when I'm in charge" because far few techbros get that "are we the baddies" skit. The real problem is Linden Labs has economy worth a half billion dollars a year and has done for twenty fricking years and that number doesn't grow, that number doesn't shrink, that number is the reasonable, proven limit of a virtual world for grownups. To be Meta you have to look at Second Life and decide that it's worth blowing a hundred and forty years worth of the space's ENTIRE ECONOMY (not its revenue - its revenue is about $100m a year) to do the same thing, only in VR. Nobody at Second Life has ever asked for VR.My pet theory is that some Meta execs have seen the numbers VRChat has been doing and keep pointing to it as if it's something they can achieve, too.
The real problems under Meta's endeavor is that their prices are eliminating almost all competition, whilst also being the only one in the VR space to essentially abandon developers, in a space where developers have to take enormous gambles to even operate.