Facebook parent company Meta is reportedly paying huge sums of money to developers building its Metaverse.
Sources close to the company reveal that Meta’s programmers working on the company’s virtual reality suite earn a total compensation from $600,000 to packages approaching $1 million.
The tech giant which has been eyeing expansion into the metaverse for some time now, however, had a rough start, incurring billions in losses. Last February, Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed that the company has spent more than 10 billion dollars in the process of developing the Metaverse.
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It includes a variety of products which includes Reality Labs Division, which makes virtual reality goggles, and smart glasses, all of these products are key to Zukerberg’s vision of the Metaverse, a next generation of the internet where people would share virtual worlds and experiences across different software and hardware platforms.
Zuckerberg revealed that the investment in Metaverse so far is more than ten times the amount of money it paid to purchase Instagram in 2012. In the first three quarters of 2022, Meta lost more than $9.4 billion in the development of its Reality Labs. Somehow, between last year’s third and fourth quarters, the rate of VR spending increased even more. The company lost an additional $4.28 billion on its Reality Labs in the last three months of 2022, compared with about $3.67 billion in losses in the preceding three months.
Due to all the spending on Metaverse, it dragged down the company’s quarterly profits which fell by 8% to $10.3 billion in the three months that ended in December last year. Despite all the losses incurred, Mark Zuckerberg has kept pushing towards virtual reality, even with little to show for the efforts thus far.
Regardless of all its investment in Metaverse which is yet to become a reality, Zuckerberg has disclosed that the company doesn’t have any plans to change its long-term vision for the Metaverse. It is also interesting to note that at the beginning of the year, Meta was approved by a judge in the U.S. to go ahead with acquiring a virtual reality company.
Before the ruling, Meta was slammed with a lawsuit from the Federal Trade Commission against Meta and the company’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg in an attempt to block its ultimate goal of owning the entire Metaverse.
In 2023, the company expects its total expenses to be lower than previously forecast. However, Meta didn’t specify if that means it will be backing off of Metaverse spending. In efforts to calm investors in November, Zuckerberg said that WhatsApp and Messenger would be the company’s future focal points for boosting income.
