Is the metaverse already over? After sinking millions of dollars and hundreds of hours of development into this project, Meta appears to be putting the foot on the brakes for its ambitions in the sector.
More layoffs at Meta
This new round of layoffs comes after a deadly year 2022 from this point of view, since the company had already got rid of more than 20,000 employees in a few months. But this time, the plan affects a branch of the firm that until now was believed to be immune from the savings measures.
It is in fact that of Reality Labs, in charge of the development of the metaverse, which will toast this time. More precisely, it is the teams responsible for creating in-house chips that are concerned.
The Facebook Agile Silicon Team, since that is its name, today has around 600 employees. And while we don’t yet know how many of them will be affected by this new starting plan, that says something about the company’s ambitions regarding the metaverse.
The already cheesy metaverse?
Obsessed with this technological innovation since 2021 (even changing the name of the company to Meta), Mark Zuckerberg’s firm has experienced numerous disappointments in recent months. At the end of 2022, Reality Labs was already making losses of $3.7 billion after having swallowed up $12 billion in the sector the same year.
At the same time, companies like Tencent also stopped their investments in the metaverse, because they had difficulty seeing it as anything other than a huge financial pit. All this against a backdrop of chronic public disinterest in this virtual world.
As ChatGPT has since moved on, the media and investors’ gaze has turned away from the metaverse to focus on the world of artificial intelligence. And despite an advertising campaign which sought to revive interest in the virtual world, this new layoff plan clearly shows that Meta believes less and less in its own invention.
Source : Reuters
1