Maybe the metaverse isn’t the next big thing after all. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg rebranded his company in 2021 to “Meta,” with a promise that virtual reality was the future of his social media company. “The next platform will be even more immersive — an embodied internet where you’re in the experience, not just looking at it,” he said in an open “founder’s letter” to the public. But there are fresh signs that the project might not have have legs.
Disney is eliminating its entire 50-person metaverse team, The Wrap reports, and “it’s on the trailing end of enthusiasm that’s already fizzled.” Indeed, a number of other tech firms are “letting disappointing VR experiments quietly expire or peter out in obscurity.” Media reports in February suggested that Microsoft was pulling back on its own metaverse efforts, Sony reports that it is selling fewer PlayStation VR2 headsets than it expected. Walmart just shuttered its “Universe of Play” on the Roblox metaverse platform. And even Meta is doing a round of layoffs.
The metaverse is facing a “cooldown moment,” Fran Velasquez writes at CoinDesk. But it’s also possible that this cooldown moment is a retrenching toward future growth: After all, brands like Dolce & Gabbana, Balmain, and Tommy Hilfiger just participated in a “Metaverse Fashion Week” that featured digital models strutting on a virtual catwalk. But news of the metaverse’s struggles is inspiring some schadenfreude — including from Elon Musk, who has some problems of his own. He greeted news of the Disney layoffs with a tweet: “Nature is healing.”
Read more: The Week
