More than 1,000 Meta employees — the ones who brought you the metaverse — are now looking for work.
The company behind Facebook and Instagram laid off more than 1,000 employees from its Virtual Reality (VR)-focused division, Reality Labs. As first reported by Bloomberg, this means the closure of VR game development studios like Sanzaru, Twisted Pixel, and Armature.
The news was delivered via an internal memo from Andrew Bosworth, Meta's CEO. Bosworth said Meta will refocus its metaverse efforts on other products in the future, such as wearables. That means you can expect more products like the Ray-Ban Display smart glasses, with AI and Augmented Reality (AR) — and fewer like the VR Meta Quest 3.
Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg unveiled the metaverse way back in the pandemic year of 2021. His big bet was that we would all use VR headsets to hang out and do work meetings remotely in virtual spaces. The perceived need for this was so strong, Zuckerberg made the company itself change its name from Facebook to Meta.
Since then, Meta's Quest headsets have found some success as recreational devices. But the metaverse itself, as an all-encompassing everyday destination, never really materialized. Reality Labs lost more than $70 billion since 2021, according to Engadget.
The end result is that more than 1,000 people have to figure out what's next, while the executives who made the decision to chase the metaverse in the first place will remain at their posts.