Comment by tyleo
5 days ago
Yeah, it was a bizarre decision. There isn't a clear ROI on games and that's what Horizon Worlds has been the whole time. There's no equation that says a 100M game automatically makes 100x more than a 1M game on average. If anything the equation is sub-linear. 100B just doesn't seem like the right size for a game investment.
It's supposed to be a Roblox competitor, which does print money, though probably not to the extent of how much they invested.
The problems are 2 fold:
People/kids don't want to put on a VR headset to play Roblox. I guess they're conceding this point by pivoting to mobile.
Meta is the opposite of cool. Real name requirements, only humanoid avatars, super corpo branding, etc really seriously hold them back from competing with VRChat or Roblox. This one is terminal it'll never be fixable as long as Meta is at the helm.
Even Roblox doesn’t print money if you look into that business. They print engagement but are still fighting tooth and nail to make a dime on it.
I can see Meta wanting the engagement though.
If they wanted a Roblox competitor, they could have bought Roblox for much less than the billions they spent.
Even now it's still less.
100B wasn't spent on a game. The RL org is much larger than Horizon Worlds, or even VR