The numbers aren't all that much more palatable at 24,000 man-years, assuming $1M average TC.

That's equivalent to the amount of labor it took to build some of the minor Egyptian pyramids.

Then FB/Meta's throwing money out the door on people who demonstrably do not deserve $1M+/yr.

And on that topic, same with Wikipedia, why "must" you have your development base in the most expensive place on the West Coast?

Per https://www.gamedevmap.com/ there are Many other, less expensive, locations. America has a bunch, even Africa has gamedevs. They're an International megacorp, with 3 billion monthly active user (probably still a lot of dupes). India has the largest FB audience (366 million, 2024), not America (100 million). Will an Indian developer make you a launch app for less than $1M+/yr? New Dehli has 17 game studios (including Riot Games) and Mumbai has 33 (Ubisoft Mumbai and Pune).

How is it demonstrable that they aren't worth $1m per year?

While in many cases folks are overpaid in big tech, some of them are insanely talented people who can do things others simply cannot.

> How is it demonstrable that they aren't worth $1m per year?

Probably because of this:

> How does any company burn $36 billion on a headset they got handed a prototype for?

That's confusing the decision to work on something with the quality of the folks working on it. Brilliant engineers often work on things which are risky from a market perspective. It doesn't make them less brilliant at engineering when it turns out there isn't a market for the thing.

John Carmack appears to be brilliant. I'd guess he would admit the VR market didn't turn out as hoped.

> he would admit the VR market didn't turn out as hoped

That's not what he said though. What he said is that Meta is basically incompetent.

And from a leadership perspective it might well be / might have been. I don't think he ever criticized the quality of engineers there.