To our delight, it seems that the Quest 3 managed to change the situation. Whether in the R&D section of MetaofHorizon Worlds or the PCVR world, a renewal is being created. Despite the repeated layoffs, despite the fact that the metaverse of Meta is still just as ugly, despite the fact that the PCVR is still not within the reach of all budgets, it seems to work much more than in the past. An explanation is required.
Meta Reality Labs
RealityLabs is the branch of Meta dedicated to designing the future of immersive technologies (Quest, Horizon Worlds, neural bracelet, AR glasses, etc.). However, this division has recently faced layoffs frequent, and this, due to multiple broken promises, which deterred many investors.
Against all expectations, here is the R&D section of Meta has just achieved its highest turnover in the fourth quarter of 2023 and for the first time in its history, thus exceeding one billion dollars.
Meta reported quarterly revenue of $1.07 billion. If the figures tend to increase at the end of the year (Christmas obliges), it is never seen. Susan Lifinancial director at Metamade the same observation, revealing to investors that this figure was obtained thanks to the Meta Quest 3released on October 10.
L’Apple Vision Pro should also catch up since 200,000 pre-orders have been made, which should bring in revenue for the firm of Cupertino the trifle of 700 million dollars in turnover. It therefore seems that Meta still has a lot to do to try to stay leader on the market.
If the firm of Zuckerberg can only congratulate ourselves, the company specifies that the fourth quarter is also the one where expenses are the highest:
During the last quarter of 2023, no less than $5.72 billion was spent, a loss of $4.65 billion over three months.
Eh yes, from the beginning, RealityLabs spends more than 50% of its resources on research. Susan Li recently stated that these will intensify in 2024 due to “continued product development efforts in the augmented/virtual reality space and their investments to further develop their ecosystem.”
Meta would also intend to market a Quest 3 Lite this year and would work on a Quest Pro 2 (in collaboration with LG) which would be released for 2025. Let’s not lose sight of the section gaming, with the acquisition of 8 video game studios over the last two years, including 2 triple A: Assassin’s Creed Nexus VR And Asgard’s Wrath 2. Horizon Worldsnow accessible through a web browser or a Smartphone (only in the USA) should, in the long term, make up for this deficit.
Mark Zuckerberg is once again reassuring, having declared in the past that he did not expect that RealityLabs is profitable, at least until 2030believing that future technological challenges will take more and more time to overcome.
During the presentation of his quarterly results, the boss of Meta revealed an interesting detail:
Horizon grows rapidly. It is now one of the 10 most used applications on Quest and we have an exciting roadmap ahead of us. This is another example of applying the long-term strategy I talked about earlier about AI, but in a different area. We’re taking the time to develop the core technology and fine-tune the experience, and then when it’s ready, we’ll be able to scale things up. This year we will focus on developing the mobile version ofHorizon and the VR version.
At the end of last year, his company has released a number of in-house productions, which, if they do not equal the level of a real traditional VR game, are a notch above than what we could usually find on the platform. Let’s quote Shootball, Super Rumble And Citadel.
Apart from this, it must be recognized that despite the arrival of Meta Quest 3the metaverse of the firm still seems far from the promises that Zuckerberg had mentioned during Meta Connect 2021. If the hardcore-gamers are obviously not the target ofHorizon Worlds, more and more young players are joining the formulaand for good reason : if they can spend whole days in front of Robloxthey can do it well in front Horizon Worlds. They are also increasingly pushed to take the step since Meta has, over the course of updates, integrated its application into the menus: it’s hard to miss it!
Anyone who has connected (wired or wireless) a Meta Quest 3 to a PC VR-Ready are unanimous: the slap is indeed present! And for good reason, lentils pancakes of the headset (and the higher resolution) have a lot to do with it. It therefore seems that word of mouth has worked and that more and more fans want to take the plunge, especially since the release of the injector UEVR of Praydogallowing you to convert games Unreal Engine 4 & 5 in VR. If the equipment to take advantage of it remains quite expensive and easily exceeds the €1200 markif you need at least a 3070-4070 (or even above if you want to go up in definition) to benefit from it, to try it is to adopt it, and it is then difficult to go back (what we call in the jargon the effect Half-Life Alyx).
Let’s get back to the numbers. If the share of Meta Quest 2 remains significant (more than 20 million sales), the Meta Quest 3 rises gradually in the ranking, which remains impressive given the inflation which still continues to affect many countries around the world. The Q3 usage share has almost tripled in three months: it was 5.2% in November, 9.27% in December and now reached 14.05% in January. This remains impressive, because the numbers never really move much in this ranking, and tend to go down more than up (those that continue to go down are in reality old helmets). THE Meta Quest 3 should logically exceed the Valve Index in the month of February.
If it were to exceed theOculus Quest 2this would send a welcome sign to developers PCVR who could take advantage of the craze to attempt a breakthroughthey who failed to do so at the very beginning of the democratization of virtual reality, the fault of a setup VR far too expensive at the time (€3000 minimum) and constraints far too difficult to overcome (overpriced wired headsets, beacons of tracking to be fixed, overall very limited experience…).
The share of use of Quest 3 continues to grow faster than all other headsets, by far! It was 5.2% in November, then 9.27% in December, and now 14.05% in January.
If we combine the figure of all helmets Oculus And Metawe arrive at 69% market share, compared to 15% for Valve Indexyet on its own platform (but offered way too expensive). This year, the Meta Quest 3 Lite should appear, allowing the firm to remain leader in this market, with 3 out of 4 helmets of the brand which would be used for PCVR. It should be noted that thehe percentage of players has also increased significantly since December, going from 1.84% to 2.24% in January. Yes, the world PCVR is therefore far from having given its last word!
The latest mixed reality headset is available on the website Meta and on Amazon. The model with 128 GB of storage costs 549.99 euros while the one with 512 GBit is sold at 699.99 euros.