Even at Meta's nonsensical pay scales of ~$250,000, $15B a year is still like 60,000 employees working all year long. 60,000 employees at 2000 hours (gov FYE) and they got ... ~nothing? 900 players??? There's like 10 games this week on Steam with more than 900 players. [1] It would be more like 125,000 developers at reasonable pay scales. (while still making six figure salaries, maybe $120k)
Major game studios are maybe 500-3000. Battlefield (DICE, 700 [2]), Call of Duty supposedly 3,000 [3] (Infinity Ward, 450 [4], Sledgehammer Games, 250 [5]), Final Fantasy XIV (Squeenix, 260-300 [6]). Every one has 100,000's of players or millions.
Valve's entire company is ~300-400 and they made their own (actually multiple) functional VR headset(s). (First SteamVR gets mediocre (heavy, blurry) reviews, second Steam Frame seems to get at least acceptable reviews) [7]. It's one of the most popular uses for all those Quest Headsets that Meta dropped the ball on.
Wasting $70,000,000,000 for ~nothing seems like it must just be accounting nonsense or a scam. 60,000 to 125,000 people working for years, and there were not layer upon layers of managers screaming warnings about the insane waste of money and lack of players?
"Umm, we've got like 900 players ... The insane management echo chamber will never listen to me, yet, could you, like, warn somebody or something ..."
[1] https://steamdb.info/upcoming/?lastweek&sort=peak_desc
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DICE_(company)
[3] https://www.gamesradar.com/over-3000-people-are-working-on-c...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinity_Ward
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sledgehammer_Games
[6] https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comments/6f76zy/the_ffxiv_dev...
magicalhippo•1mo ago
Sure hardware is hard, and expensive, but man that's a lot of monies.