Last week, Meta released its latest third-quarter earnings report, revealing that the next-generation VR device, Quest 3, will be launched later next year. Earlier this month, Meta founder Zuckerberg had confirmed that the price of Quest 3 is about $300-500, and two months ago, Meta raised the official website price of the 128GB version of Quest 2 from $300 to $400, saying that it was mainly due to inflation , but the price of other channels has not been raised, which seems to imply that the starting price of Quest 3 is $400.
But in addition to the prediction of new products, Meta's performance in all aspects last quarter was not satisfactory. After the financial report was released, the stock price fell accordingly, with a drop of more than 20%. On the one hand, the advertising business has suffered a heavy blow, and on the other hand, the "Metaverse" project with Reality Labs as its core has once again fallen into controversy. After the release of the financial report of
, Meta's stock price fell
financial report also showed that the Reality Labs department, which Quest belongs to, had revenue of only US$285 million in the last quarter, and its loss expanded from US$2.6 billion in the same period last year to US$3.7 billion. Considering that ByteDance's "premium" acquisition of Pico last year only cost US$1.5 billion, it means that it has lost nearly 2.5 Picos in the past three months. The troubles of
Quest and Meta are far more than that. The emergence of Pico and Bytes, as well as the storm of Apple VR products, have laid the shadow of Quest's future.
is deeply trapped in the mud
Facebook was renamed Meta in October last year. Before that, Facebook's market value exceeded $1 trillion, becoming the fifth technology company to exceed $1 trillion at that time. At that time, the market may have recognized the direction of " Meta Universe ", or was more concerned about how to get rid of the negative image represented by "Facebook", and there were not many voices of opposition to the name change.
But a year has passed, everything has changed.
The story of the meta-universe is no longer attractive. Meta's core advertising business is affected by the adjustment of Apple privacy policy and the slowdown in global economy . The stock price has fallen by more than 70% from its peak, losing more than US$730 billion in market value.
Even the most active Facebook users dropped from 1.93 billion to 1.929 billion, which is the first time Zuckerberg has fallen in 17 years since he founded Facebook at Harvard University.
Quest 2, picture/Meta
There are also continuous expansion losses. The Reality Labs division, which is responsible for the Metauniverse software and hardware, has lost $9.4 billion this year, and Quest 2, which has been on sale for two years, has also experienced weak sales, with revenue of only $285 million, far below analysts' general expectations of $406 million and also below $452 million in the second quarter.
Meta also warned that the losses of the sector will increase significantly year-on-year in 2023.
As one of Meta's major shareholders, Altimeter Capital CEO Brad Gerstner sent a stern-worded open letter Monday asking Zuckerberg to cut wage costs by 20% and limit spending in the meta-universe to less than $5 billion a year.
But as early as this year's shareholders' meeting, Zuckerberg told all shareholders that they should invest at least in the metaverse in the next five years:
70 billion US dollars.
Even if inflation is considered, this number is far beyond Apple's investment in iPhone and Google in Android.
"Listen, I know a lot of people may not agree with this investment, but I think it will be a very important thing." He also further explained on the latest earnings call, "In ten years, people will look back and talk about the importance of this work (metauniverse)."
The problem is that ten years are too long and there are too many variables.
In the past two years, Quest 2 is the world's most popular headset device, with a total of more than 15 million units sold.But after waiting for two years, Meta only released the $1,500 Quest Pro - a VR headset for commercial users, which also supports MR through color perspective technology.
Quest Pro, picture/Meta
As for Quest 3, VR users will have to wait until next fall. New technologies such as Pancake lenses and color perspective are likely to be standard, and there is also the key Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2. According to the current outflow, the XR2 Gen 2 is enough to be expected in at least one key metric – supporting monocular 4K.
But for Meta and Quest, there are more difficult problems at hand. Internal documents obtained by WSJ show that more than 50% of Quest users will no longer use it after 6 months of purchase. At the same time, Meta originally planned that the monthly active users of Horizon World, the virtual social platform, will reach 500,000 by the end of this year, and will actually reach less than 200,000 by October.
To be fair, this is not just a problem with Meta, but a problem with the entire VR industry. Weight, wearing experience and display are the parts that affect the user's basic experience most at the hardware level and still need further improvement; content and socialization are the keys for users to "use" VR devices, such as "Half-Life: Alex" and popular masterpieces that have made breakthroughs in VR experience.
Of course, none of these can deny the success of Quest in the VR market. The report released by IDCh in June showed that Meta accounts for 90% of the global VR device market.
Next will be the key to testing Meta and Quest. Just the opponents who are currently in place should attract the attention of Meta, especially when it comes with VR devices that are better and cheaper than Quest 2 hardware.
byte backstab Meta
byte beat more and more are being compared with Meta. In addition to the substantial threat to Facebook by TikTok's global siege, Pico, acquired by ByteDance, is also one of the main targets of attention, especially after the release of the Pico 4 series in September.
It is obvious to all that ByteDance has invested a lot of money and traffic to this Pico 4 series.
offline. According to the official website, Pico's dealers have quickly expanded to about 216 in 26 provinces and cities across the country, including retail supermarkets such as Sam .
Pico offline experience activity, picture/Pico
is online, in addition to posting a large number of advertisements on its own platforms such as Douyin and Toutiao, no important platforms such as B station and Xiaohongshu have been spared. In addition, the Pico 4 series has also begun to jump out of the Chinese market and land in Japan, South Korea and 13 European countries.
In fact, there is news in the vertical media AR circle that ByteDance increased Pico's annual sales target from 1 million units to 1.8 million units due to the marketing effect exceeding expectations.
This cannot be solved by marketing alone. Fortunately, Pico 4 also has good performance at the product level.
Pico 4 actually surpasses Quest 2 in the hardware level of the headset, whether it is the key Pancake technology adoption, or 2K screen resolution and camera perspective.
This is also natural, after all, Quest 2 was released in the fall two years ago. But even compared with the Quest Pro released at the same time, Pico 4 can have a certain advantage in individual aspects such as screen resolution.
At the Pro level, the actual target Pico 4 Pro also adds the core color perspective and eye tracking/face tracking like Quest Pro. The gap is more reflected in the sensors, algorithms and the performance improvement brought by the Snapdragon XR2 Gen 1+.
However, once the former price is 3799 yuan and the latter price is 1500 US dollars (approximately RMB 10878), the price of Pico 4 Pro will be increased immediately.
But whether for commercial users or individual consumers, if VR devices want users to use them, the more important thing is the content ecosystem and software algorithms, which Pico will not be able to catch up with Quest in the short term.
byte is not a lack of knowledge about your content. Currently, games are still the core in VR. In addition, fitness is also the direction for both Meta and Byte to make efforts, followed by Meta's strong social field.
On the one hand, Quest's relatively huge sales and market share determines that more developers and creators will enter Quest's VR content ecosystem.
On the other hand, Byte has transferred personnel such as Ren Lifeng, the head of Xigua Video, Song Binghua, the head of Douyin variety show, Wu Zuomin, the director of Douyin entertainment, and other personnel to the VR department. They have also selected , Chaoxi Guangnian and Ohayoo to form a self-developed VR game studio.
According to Forbes magazine in June, Pico formed a large-scale content team in West Coast in the United States, and some TikTok employees also joined the team, including Sally Wang, the director who was previously responsible for the development of TikTok's content partnership business.
is not enough.
picture/Meta
byte game is far from attracting VR users. Fitness comparison Meta can't be said to have obvious advantages, and social networking is even more impossible to talk about. In terms of price, the Quest 2 and Pico 4 are actually almost the same, and the chips are also made of the same Snapdragon XR2 from two years ago.
For Pico, a greater possibility is hidden in the domain name of the official website (picoxr.com).
Although Pico currently only has VR products and Weibo also has "VR", Pico's overseas accounts are "XR" just like the official website. More importantly, color perspective opens up a path to MR for both the Quest Pro and the Pico 4 Pro.
But there will probably be apples on this road.
Everyone is waiting for Apple
"There is virtual reality (VR), and augmented reality (AR) - both are very interesting. But my personal opinion is that AR is the bigger of the two, and may be the largest so far."
"AR is a big idea."
"AR is a big idea, just like a smartphone."
"I am the number one fan of AR."
The Verge compiled 2016-2021 Apple CEO Cook 's public statement on AR in five years, no matter how you can see Apple's ambitions for AR.
There is too much information that proves that Apple has started developing AR devices since early on - patents, acquisitions, leaks, and supply chains, and there are many. To this day, it is generally believed that Apple's AR device will not be launched until 2025, and will first launch a VR device next year. Bloomberg's Mark Gruman once again stated in August that the device will be released in 2023, which is likely to be at the developer conference. The reporter from
The Information saw the product prototype of this VR device and drew it accordingly.
Picture/The Information
Combined with the information of Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, Apple analyst Kuo Mingchi and The Information, it can be roughly known that this VR headset is expected to be equipped with an M2 chip and 16GB of memory, and may also have a chip that specializes in processing device sensor data - considering Apple's habits, you should choose an old A-series chip.
There are more rumors, such as single-eye 4K resolution, prototype weight between 200-300g (target is 100-200g), equipped with more than ten optical lenses, etc.
In fact, from VR users to developers to practitioners, everyone is waiting for Apple's "boots" to land. On the one hand, everyone knows that the current headsets are not good enough, and product interaction is particularly prominent; on the other hand, Apple is often inseparable from talking about product design and user experience in the entire technology industry. What about
Meta? So far, there is no other hardware product that can be used as a standout besides Quest.In terms of product design, the Pico team has proved that it is not inferior to Quest; in the supply chain, Pico itself is derived from the Goertek , which produces Quest, and can even get in touch with the latest application technologies faster and adjust products more flexibly; ByteDance can also provide more support for funds, traffic and even content than Meta, which is deeply trapped in the quagmire.
Needless to say, Apple's authority in product design and control of the supply chain. At the same time, as the richest company on the planet, Apple also holds more than $250 billion in cash reserves. What's more serious is that Apple has created several times consumer electronics products that define the entire industry - Mac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, AirPods, let alone the history Apple has created in the two generations of computing platforms of personal computers and smartphones.
is all VR, but the window is still the same as PC. Picture/Meta
These are all things Meta does not have, but fortunately it also has 3.71 billion monthly active users around the world (2.9 billion Facebook, 2.9 billion Instagram, 2 billion WhatsApp, more than 2 billion WhatsApp), more than 15 million Quest users, and an existing content ecosystem.
But all this depends on whether Zuckerberg and Meta can continue to "bear the weight".
