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IT Home reported on November 2 that Meta Chief Financial Officer Susan Li said on the company's third-quarter 2026 earnings call that its Reality Labs division generated $443 million in revenue in the third quarter (IT Home note: approximately 2.951 billion yuan at the current exchange rate), down 6% year over year. The decline was mainly due to lower sales of Quest headsets, although continued strong growth in the AI smart glasses business offset some of the impact.
Meta is currently adjusting its hardware priorities, directing more resources toward wearables and AI while lowering the priority of consumer VR hardware and its metaverse business. However, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on the call that the company “has not completely given up on VR.” He remains optimistic about the technology's long-term potential, but “at this stage Meta will prioritize investment in AI”:
I still believe that achieving a holographic experience that blends the physical and digital worlds on glasses worn every day will ultimately require starting with VR technology. However, we will adjust the pace of this investment and prioritize achieving superintelligence.
Under Meta's plans, its latest product, Meta VR Glasses, is expected to go on sale in spring 2027, primarily targeting premium consumers and professionals. The product is also seen as an important experiment in Meta's next phase of VR hardware strategy, positioned more as a transitional product on the way to augmented reality (AR) devices.
By contrast, it remains unclear how Meta's gaming-focused Quest platform will develop. As the company slows its regular VR hardware updates and uses Meta VR Glasses to target a different group of users, Quest's place in its overall product strategy may also change.
From a market strategy perspective, Meta could theoretically also sharply cut the prices of the Quest 3 and Quest 3S during this year's holiday shopping season to offset the impact of full-year VR hardware sales falling short of expectations. However, even if price cuts boost sales in the short term, they may not change Meta's long-term assessment of the consumer VR market.
Notably, Meta already cut a substantial amount of funding for the development of large, costly VR games earlier this year, and there is currently no clear sign that the company plans to restore its previous level of investment. For a VR platform centered on gaming content, reducing investment in major game projects is clearly not entirely consistent with a strategy of sustained long-term commitment to the consumer VR market.