Meta coughing up big money to developers building its metaverse

Despite turbulent times for Meta in terms of metaverse development, sources close to the company say its metaverse programmers are paid up to $1 million for their work.

Tech giant Meta — the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and the WhatsApp messaging service — has been eyeing expansion into the metaverse for some time now. However, it has had a rough start, with billions in losses.

Nonetheless, a new report from The Wall Street Journal says that Meta’s programmers working on the company’s virtual reality suite can earn total compensation from “$600,000 to packages approaching $1 million.”

The report says the information on metaverse developer salaries at Meta came from anonymous “people familiar with the matter.”

According to reports from the beginning of the year, the company’s metaverse-building division, Reality Labs, lost $13.7 billion over the course of 2022. It marked the division’s largest yearly losses recorded.

However, Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s co-founder and CEO, has been on record saying the company doesn’t have any plans to change its long-term vision for the metaverse. In fact, at the beginning of February 2023, Meta was given approval by a judge in the United States to go forward with acquiring a virtual reality company.

Prior to that ruling, Meta was served with a lawsuit from the Federal Trade Commission against Meta and Zuckerberg as an attempt to block “its ultimate goal of owning the entire ‘metaverse.’”

Recently, two U.S. senators released a letter addressed to Zuckerberg urging the Meta CEO not to allow teenagers access to the metaverse platform Horizon Worlds. They cited “serious risks” and called it a “digital space rife with potential harms.”

On March 13, the head of commerce and financial technologies at Meta tweeted that the company was slowly stopping its support for nonfungible tokens on Facebook and Instagram for the time being. According to the executive, the move was to “focus on other ways to support creators, people, and businesses.”

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