Meta poured billions into its VR and metaverse efforts. It even renamed the company after it. But after the recent round of cuts and product pullback, Meta’s CTO acknowledge that the industry was growing “more slowly than we had hoped.”
Andrew “Boz” Bosworth did a Q&A on his Instagram story on Monday. One of the questions Meta’s chief technology officer received: “There is a lot of doom and gloom about the future of Quest and gaming. What is the truth?”
Bosworth said that the doom and gloom was mostly “overwrought.”
“There is a real cause for sadness here,” Bosworth said, referencing Meta’s recent cuts to its Reality Labs division, which houses Meta’s metaverse and VR bets. “You have people doing work that we were excited about, that we wanted to have in the system.”
Meta realized that its vision for Horizon and VR was “too much,” he said. Reality Labs has racked up more than $70 billion in losses since 2020.
“The investment that we put in is bigger than the growth that this ecosystem will allow,” he said. “That’s a real loss. We are allowed to feel sad about those things.”
Meta has cut several of its VR products, including its virtual workplace and fitness apps.
Still, Bosworth maintained that Meta was “extremely bullish on VR,” and that the company was investing more in content than any competitor.
“Yes, we’ve receded from the high watermark, but we are still very much a net positive investor in the ecosystem,” he said.
Reality Labs also houses Meta’s AI glasses bet, which it has expanded rapidly. As Meta has bet big on wearables, some onlookers wondered whether that would require a pullback on VR.
In December, Bosworth said that the two products were separate and that Meta can pursue both. In the February update, he said that was still true.
“If VR were growing at the rate we all wish it were, we probably wouldn’t have made these changes, and wearables would still be growing a ton,” he said. “It is wrong to think of those things as zero-sum.”
A year ago, Bosworth prophesied 2025 would be make-or-break for the metaverse. “This year likely determines whether this entire effort will go down as the work of visionaries or a legendary misadventure,” he wrote in a memo obtained by Business Insider.
Which was it: the work of visionaries or a legendary misadventure? It’s still unclear — though Bosworth doesn’t sound so optimistic.
“It doesn’t mean we’re going to invest infinitely, forever,” he said. “We do need to have our investment match the size of growth.”
