36 billion dollars. Here is the amount that the Meta group, formerly Facebook, invested in their division RealityLabs. The latter is responsible for the implementation of the metaverse, dear to Mark Zuckerberg, the virtual universe. grand group boss. But despite the excessive ambitions of the creator of Facebook, the results are still very disappointing. To better understand the size of the investment Meta has made since 2019 in this project, our colleagues from business Insider has compiled a list of tech products that have been developed at a lower cost. An iPhone released in 2007 would have cost Apple nearly $150. millions dollars, according to an anonymous company executive in a 2013 interview.
iPhone and Android: light years from Meta
A figure that would be heavily underestimated according to The information which rather estimates the production and development cost of the first iPhone at around $2-3 billion. Even at this scale, the iPhone, Apple’s pride for 15 years, would cost 10 times less than Meta’s Horizon World. A rival iPhone product, Google’s Android operating system would also cost less than Mark Zuckerberg’s virtual world. Based on Google’s financial results between 2005 and 2008, estimates put Android’s first-time value at $6 billion. version.
Xbox and PlayStation: 5 billion game consoles
If systems like Android or iPhone have been upgraded to a large extent since they were released. This does not apply to Xbox or Sony PlayStation. The two game consoles have successfully entered their era, but again the development cost is much lower than the Meta. According to Dean Takahashi, author of the Xbox book, it took Microsoft only 20 months to develop. A blitz in 2001 would have cost $4 billion ($6.8 billion today, adjusted for inflation). As for a direct competitor to the Xbox, the Sony PlayStation would cost less than $5 billion. These examples show how the Meta’s investment in the metaverse project seems out of touch with reality. Mark Zuckerberg’s passions are not appealing, and the group’s virtual world is more like a desert than a digital copy of New York.
Meta: The group goes straight to the wall
To get out of the news world technologies, the entire Artemis program, which plans to send humans back to the moon, will cost an estimated $35 billion, according to NASA. This is very close to the amount already spent by Zuckerberg and the Meta in the Metavers project. When Meta’s latest financial results were announced, the group’s investors demanded that direction reorients its activities to “profitable practice”. With a turnover of several hundred millions euro, Meta is a colossus with feet of clay.
