Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth claims that even after the cuts, the company is still investing more in VR content than anyone else, and more than it was 4 years ago.
If you somehow missed it: last month Meta shut down three of its acquired VR game studios, conducted significant layoffs at a fourth, canceled the Batman: Arkham Shadow sequel, and announced the shutdown of Horizon Workrooms and its Quest headsets for business offering. These actions came a month after the company officially confirmed “shifting some of our investment from Metaverse toward AI glasses and Wearables”.
Despite this, when asked to provide “the truth” about “doom and gloom” for Quest during an “ask me anything” session on his Instagram page, Bosworth responded by claiming that Meta is still investing more in VR content than any other company – and more than it was in 2022, at the height of the Quest 2 era.
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“There is a lot of doom and gloom about it—mostly overwrought, but I understand why it exists. Emotionally, we have to navigate two realities. First, there is a real cause for sadness. We had people doing work we were excited about, whether at the OS layer or great studios delivering great titles. Ultimately, we realized that the integrated vision we were pursuing with Horizon and VR was overwrought, and the investment we put in was larger than the growth of the ecosystem allowed. That is a real loss, and we are allowed to feel sad about those things.
On the other side, Meta remains extremely bullish on VR. Adjusting our investment profile was done specifically so that we could continue to invest. We are still investing more in content than anyone else, and more than we were four years ago. While we have receded from the “high water mark,” we are still very much a net positive investor in the ecosystem. Furthermore, these internal changes unblock roadmaps for us on hardware; the next two devices we are looking at are very exciting.
I don’t want to take away from the sadness regarding cancelled projects like another Arkham, though I wish there was more appreciation for the fact that we got the first one. Regarding community accountability and my December AMA comments about wearables versus VR: I noted then that these areas are separate and we can do both. That remains true. If VR were growing at the rate we wished, we likely wouldn’t have made these changes, but we cannot invest infinitely. Our investment must match the size of the growth. The ecosystem is growing—just more slowly than we hoped—and we are still investing. That is the story.”
David Heaney
Oculus and Anduril founder Palmer Luckey made a similar claim last month, but Bosworth saying it serves as an official proclamation from Meta itself.
Still, with most of its acquired VR gaming studios now closed, that “content” investment will not be arriving in the form of first-party blockbusters. Instead, Bosworth is likely referring to investment in third-party VR content.
In an interview with Axios last month, Bosworth said that Meta will now
“focus a lot more on the third-party content library, the ecosystem that’s developed there”.
Whether or not Meta will follow through on this suggestion of continuing to fund third-party VR content remains to be seen.
