Comment by wpietri

Zuckerberg was the one who said $3 billion. Which doesn't count ongoing development expense for the last 3 years, but from news reports it looks to be in the billions. And apparently they're spending circa another $1 billion on VR acquisitions this year: https://www.fool.com/investing/2019/12/07/facebook-is-on-a-b...

I do believe that it doesn't cost that much to bring something VR-ish to market, as long as they're trying to replicate older hardware with commodity gear. But if they want to push the state of the art forward, I'm not shocked at all by those numbers. Apple's spending something like $15 billion a year on R&D, and billions more on acquisitions. Maybe that's unnecessary for VR, but certainly a lot of VR advocates still believe that true success requires further technical innovation.