Fellas, is it a bad look if you rename your company to focus on the metaverse and then decide later to nuke that metaverse ambition? That’s just some of the egg on the face of Mark Zuckerberg, though the Facebook/Meta CEO’s failure naturally means that other people – 1,500 of them to be exact – are paying the price instead of him, as that’s the number of workers who have been laid off as a result of the company’s end to its attempt to popularize the metaverse.
The layoffs, which impact 10% of Meta’s workforce and saw its in-house Reality Labs shutter, also saw three virtual reality-specific gaming studios owned by the company shut down as well. Meta’s own Horizon Worlds VR game platform will still operate, though in a diminished capacity. The layoffs are part of Facebook’s wider plan to move away from metaverse development and towards AI and wearable tech, according to a statement provided to IGN.
The gamble on creating a metaverse was an almost immediate money sink for the company, costing it over $60 billion since 2020. Of course, we can certainly point out that Zuck’s idea of a metaverse and one proposed by an actual seasoned game dev are not the same, but that’s hardly a salve for the thousands who now have to navigate a tumultuous industry.
