We hope to basically get to around a billion people in the metaverse doing hundreds of dollars of commerce, each buying digital goods, digital content, different things to express themselves, so whether that’s clothing for their avatar or different digital goods for their virtual home or things to decorate their virtual conference room, utilities to be able to be more productive in virtual and augmented reality and across the metaverse overall
, he said.
But the company’s investment in augmented reality and virtual reality dates back to 2014, when it paid $2 billion for headset maker Oculus VR. Shipments of headsets have failed to outnumber shipments of PCs or smartphones. Zuckerberg expressed optimism about the performance of its current-generation Meta Quest 2, which starts at $299.
Quest 2 has been a hit
, Zuckerberg told the “Mad Money” host.
I’ve been really happy with how that’s gone. It has exceeded my expectations. But I still think it’s going to take a while for it to get to the scale of several hundreds of millions or even billions of people in the metaverse, just because things take some time to get there. So that’s the north star. I think we will get there. But, you know, the other services that we run are at a somewhat larger scale already today.
Experiences in the metaverse can be more immersive than text, photos or videos, which are pervasive on Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, and so it will be a big theme for Meta over the next decade, Zuckerberg said.
Jordan NovetMark Zuckerberg is nothing if not committed to this plan, I’ll give him that.
For the sake of argument, let’s pretend that these numbers he’s floating are remotely plausible (they’re absolutely not). A billion people in the metaverse is roughly equivalent to the penetration of smartphones. Does a metaverse have the potential to reach that? I find it highly doubtful. When smartphones became available, their main selling point was to enable people to do everything they were doing on a desktop computer, but on the go – and over time, so much more. Does VR’s have a similarly compelling selling point? Mark Zuckerberg would probably frame it as doing everything you can do on a smartphone (and more), but in virtual spaces (why bother though?). But for now, entering VR engenders less mobility, either by being tethered to a desktop, or because carrying a VR headset for extended periods of time gets uncomfortable. Quite a disadvantage at this point unless the technology takes a massive leap forward.
The second, ever thornier question, is whether people would spend hundreds of dollars on virtual goods (each month? each year? unclear). The current massive crash of Bitcoin would argue against it, while the expansion of digital gaming revenues argues in favor. In the end, it will depend on the quality and availability of VR-ready content. Here, I can sort of see a reason behind refocusing Facebook towards AI-powered recommendations à la TikTok: in the beginning, there would be few sources of VR content, and your immediate friends and family would most certainly not have access to the tools necessary and would not post in VR space, so Meta needs an alternative source of content for people to consume regularly – enter AI recommendations.
This leads me to the next remark, which is: for all this to be successful someday, Meta should invest heavily in VR content creation, otherwise users will quickly become bored and leave. If consuming VR is expensive and cumbersome, producing it is even more expensive, so Meta should work to make the hardware required more readily accessible to large numbers of creators, or perhaps develop powerful software to convert regular content into VR-like experiences (and devise the next Office-in-VR along the way). Pushing a consumer-only device like the Quest without accompanying rich sources of content will not fuel the massive growth Mark is hyping up. Personally, I think that nothing will because most people will get tired of virtual lives pretty fast, but we’ll have to wait and see…
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