And most of those billions have gone towards acquiring app developers, game studios and Meta Labs.
They deserve a little more credit than building a Second Life clone.
So it seems popularity is decreasing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_game_cons...
How can that be more popular than Xbox? Where are those 20 million devices in use? Do people hide them?
Your comparison is a bit weird. I have seen more than 10 iPhones today, and all I did was walk to Starbucks and back.
The same internal presentation that discusses this 20+ million number also mentions huge problems in retention. People don't use their Quest very much nor very long.
Overall usage numbers are abysmal, and it is a flop. One of the major reasons why it is a flop is that even the people who really want it and actually buy it don't really have anything interesting to use it for.
Legless Second Life is a very good representative of the flop that the metaverse is.
If the Meta pivot was going as fantastic as you say it is, Mark wouldn't be going ballistic on his own employees.
What AR/VR needs is a mass market killer app, like Pokémon GO (in its heyday) or World of Warcraft or something. Not another headset. People will put up with all kinds of discomfort/inconvenience/cost if there's something interesting to do. The current crop of Metaverses don't cut it in this regard.
But AR that is really a killer app almost certainly needs a fashionable, light, easy to use headset and that's a hardware problem to a significant degree that probably doesn't have a quick fix. Yes, you can do something that's effectively a prototype that's more like a "headset" but that's almost certainly not a mass market device that most people will walk around wearing.
(There's also the social glasshole issue but my guess is that goes away with a useful enough device even if some people hate the idea.)
I really think we're just waiting for the resolution to increase and it to become thinner and lighter and better at hand tracking.
The Quest 2 is already a better experience watching 1080p surround-sound content than most people's TV's -- if you're watching by yourself. But streamers haven't quite caught onto that yet.
But once the screen becomes sharp enough to do real work and hand tracking improves dramatically, I think we're going to start seeing some dramatic shifts.
Nobody is criticizing because... there's nothing to base those criticisms on - there's no product (yet) and WWDC is rumor. Once (if) it launches, the praises and critiques will follow.
But what I don't see is people willing to do the same with Apple who has also invested billions in the space and will be showcasing their Reality platform in the next couple of months at WWDC.
Do people really want to bet against the company that has had so many consumer product successes even ones for which there was widespread doubt e.g. Apple Watch, AirPods etc.
And what if it takes off ? There will need to be another platform similar to iPhone/Android and isn't that the type of bet Meta should be making.