I cannot understand why people think Meta spent 80 billion dollars on Horizon Worlds. Meta's "Reality Labs" had a horde of experts doing state-of-the-art VR/AR/MR/XR, wearables & tracking hardware R&D. And huge teams of graphics researchers doing amazing work (hundreds of papers at top conferences, SIGGAPH etc). Built and shipped 20 million headsets. Published ~300 thirdparty games. Lots of Meta AI research was done under Reality Labs too, I believe.
And yes they also made a shitty metaverse thing. But it was never just that, and saying this money was "wasted" is stupid. R & D costs money, and a ton of it was contributed back to the public domain.
I suggested Metaverse was a money laundering/tax evasion scheme and people insisted it was just bad game dev.
It was both. It could have been 100x "better" and amazing and STILL be money laundering.
Do people not understand how much $80 billion is. Where did it go? Not into development. Just evaporated.