Especially gamers and developers have bought the Oculus Rift. That’s what Facebook says in its discussion of its quarterly figures. According to FB founder Mark Zuckerberg, it will be a long time before virtual reality is ready for use by ordinary consumers.
Zuckerberg declined to share numbers on hardware deliveries of his virtual reality products, the Oculus Rift and the Gear VR along with Samsung. He did share some other stats, though: about fifty games have been made for the Oculus Rift and users have watched two million hours of video on the Gear VR, for which Oculus makes the software.
Due to the limited audience of the Rift, gamers and developers, the project costs money for Facebook for the time being. “But ultimately, we believe that virtual reality will be the next great computing platform and we’re investing in it now to lead the way there,” Zuckerberg said.
Facebook as a social network now has 1.65 billion active monthly users, about 63 million more than three months ago. More than 1.5 billion of these use the social network via their mobile. Of all monthly users, 333 million are in Europe, an increase of ten million.
As a company, unlike many other tech companies, Facebook achieved a good result. Sales increased by 52 percent compared to the same period last year to 5.38 billion dollars, currently about 4.74 billion euros. Profits tripled in the same period to more than $1.5 billion.