This article is kind of shitty. It looks like the content was mostly taken from the general media coverage that was going around pre-pandemic, edited to incorporate the latest Meta financials. This happens every time new numbers are published. R&D is not cheap and a vast amount of Meta's research has not been converted to revenue.

Reality Labs is also where Meta's AI development is happening, so their costs are not just VR-related research. It's also LLM and other machine learning domains. There is some crossover, such as computer vision, but a lot of their research does not directly apply to what we currently consider VR/MR/AR.

Quest 2 sold over 20 million units, and nearly as many Quest 2/3 have been sold as X-Box Series X/S consoles. Quest products are frequently in a sold-out state on Amazon. That is not an "obvious lack of success". The only thing obvious is the clueless premise of the entire article (what is "MAGR" anyway?). Framing VR as a gaming platform is another sign that the article was copy-pasted from something written many years ago.

Quest 3 is awesome. VR is still growing in many ways thanks to faithful innovators and dreamers, and without Meta we would be nowhere close to where we are today. There would be no Apple Vision Pro. Finally, after a decade, we are beginning to see real competition in the industry which is already accelerating progress and further investment from Meta, Apple, Google, etc. "Microsoft has not engaged with this technology at all" -- what is Microsoft Mesh, then?

It seems the only way to justify the expenses from Meta's perspective is the long game that results in them being a dominant platform for VR apps. I think it's generally accepted that nobody wants this outcome, but meanwhile I am thankful for their investment. At this time, the Quest 3 is a relatively open platform as far as Android-based devices go. You can ADB into it and side load software, and when connected to a PC there are numerous debugging capabilities.