70 billion dollars down the drain. Meta pulls plug on Reality Labs, and a thousand people lose their jobs

Original news (January 14)

Probably even Mark Zuckerberg is starting to doubt that the metaverse will actually happen. This is clearly demonstrated by the recently announced mass layoffs in the VR gaming department of Meta.

1. Over a thousand employees from Reality Labs, the team handling virtual reality at Meta, are expected to lose their jobs. This constitutes about 10% of the entire staff of this department.
2. The reductions will result in the closure of three development studios: Armature Studios (known for the VR version of Resident Evil 4), Sanzaru Games (creators of the Asgard's Wrath series), and Twisted Pixel (creators of games like Defector and Deadpool VR).
3. In a media comment, a Meta spokesperson said that the cuts are part of a plan to dial back on metaverse investments and instead focus more on wearables, like AR glasses, and boosting AI development.
4. Meta doesn't intend, at least for now, to completely abandon VR, but these layoffs are meant to ensure savings that will make this division of the company profitable in the long run. The company is planning to dive deeper into mobile metaverse stuff, but they'll still be working on new VR headsets, just not as quickly.

These reports are just another example of how disastrous the metaverse has turned out to be. Mark Zuckerberg believed so strongly that it would be the future of the Internet that he renamed the entire company from Facebook to Meta. However, this initiative never took off. Since 2020, the Reality Labs division has incurred over $70 billion in losses.

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• Facebook / Meta
• layoffs / employments
• VR games
• metaverse