Meta invests less in metaverse than previously planned

Meta will invest less in products and services for the metaverse this year than it had previously planned. It seems to be about 3 billion dollars less. Meta wanted to put about $10 billion annually into its metaverse projects.

Meta screws according to an explanation of the quarterly figures the investments back because of the situation of the company. “These investments will be important to our long-term success and growth, so I still think we need to make them. However, with our current growth, we have a plan to slow down the pace of investment.” In the financial statement, it appears that Meta expects to spend 87 to 92 billion dollars this year instead of 90 to 95 billion dollars: about 3 billion less.

Frontman Mark Zuckerberg also spoke about the upcoming Quest headset, which is now called Project Cambria. Details will follow in the coming months and release later this year, the Facebook founder reiterated. The Horizon platform will not only work on Cambria, but also on other platforms outside of VR and AR. That should give it scale. Making eye contact and transferring facial expressions is only possible with Cambria.

The number of users of Meta’s current platforms such as Facebook and WhatsApp grew from 2.82 billion to 2.87 billion users. The growth was mainly at Facebook. Due to the shutdown of Russia as a result of the war in Ukraine, Meta lost users.

On Instagram, users now spend 20 percent of their time in Reels’ short videos, and Meta sees a great future in algorithmic feeds of content from strangers who aren’t on the user’s friends list. Reels is the TikTok copy of Meta. Time on Reels comes at the expense of time in other features of Instagram, such as the regular feed and Stories. Meta’s revenue came in at approximately $27.9 billion, up 7 percent from the same period last year. Profit came in at $7.5 billion, 21 percent less than a year ago.

Meta Project Cambria. Source: Brad Lynch