Or is it just Zuckerberg getting jealous of Musk and wants to get on the bandwagon of hypey messianic bullshit? Might want to take some charisma classes first.
Companies may develop experiences analogous to a Second Life, or Roblox, or World of Warcraft, or any other popular MMO (made more immersive by the VR medium), but I doubt they will have any further reach than those. At least I don't know why they would, anyway. To be fair, those games are successful and make lots of money, but compared to Facebook's current business they are a niche concern. So their enthusiasm seems misplaced to me.
Plus, VRChat already exists.
VRChat has so many flaws that you can't make that argument. It needs competition, and badly.
Just offhand I can think of:
* Massive performance issues
* Controversial handling of 3rd party modifications (enforcement was stepped up only to put lipstick on the pig for their Series D, and MelonLoader itself puts faux security on its software in an attempt to make it look like it cares, by curbing obfuscation)
* Poor security (players have been able to legitimately fry the hardware of other players due to GPU exploits)
* Even years after launch, still basic usability issues like status being changed unexpectedly, causing privacy issues
Those acquisitions were derided by the chattering classes at the time as well, yet time has shown them to be incredibly far-sighted.
Sure, any endeavour can certainly trip over itself and fail, but Facebook is not Yahoo circa 2012. They still have the cash and vision to execute well, and while you may disagree with the implementation (closed-source open world parallel to the current internet), I don't doubt there is a strong vision and motivation to build this within the Facebook leadership.
To starve the competitors of talent?
The stuff is insane already, and I can't fathom what it'll look like in 10-15 years.
These companies are at war trying to capture our attention on smartphones. Imagine what they'll do to win when we're all plugged in.
AVR is coming, increasingly enabled by the ever faster processors and higher resolution sensors. It'll undo anyone in the lead that can't keep up.
People doubted the Instagram purchase back in the day. I think we'll look back on this too as being prescient.
I don't disagree that they're competing for attention, nor that the field is perfect for someone to come along and show us something we weren't expecting (like VRChat; made by two people). But this is Facebook, not DARPA or Skunk Works. Their core offerings are a website, a photo sharing app they acquired, and a messaging app that they also acquired. This is fundamentally an advertising company. The wildcard was a consumer hardware company that they also acquired. This is not DNA that can innovate a 'metaverse' into existence.
You can't just grab a couple of executives, a bunch of mid-level managers, and a few hundred developers and demand that they innovate and expect anything to come out of it.