After years of failing to produce a profitable augmented reality platform, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta is pounding one of the final nails into the coffin of its metaverse efforts — the ones that were once so central to its vision that it renamed the entire company after them.
This week, the Wall Street Journal reported Meta was laying off some 1,500 employees from its Reality Labs division, the department working on Meta’s virtual reality products. As part of the layoffs, three VR game studios were shuttered, though Horizon Worlds — Meta’s online VR game platform — is still running, per IGN, albeit in a diminished capacity.
Overall, the layoffs impact nearly 10 percent of the division’s total staff, drastic cuts which come as part of the company’s shift away from virtual reality toward AI devices, like its AI smart glasses.
“We said last month that we were shifting some of our investment from Metaverse toward wearables,” a spokesman for Meta told the WSJ. “This is part of that effort.”
The layoffs are unfortunate news for the workers who will now be forced to navigate one of the worst job markets since 2003. On the other hand, it’s kind of astonishing that Meta even opted to field such a massive virtual reality team for so long.
Back in early December, the WSJ previously reported that Meta’s Reality Labs had lost the company over $77 billion since its inception in 2020. The company’s decision to finally pull the plug on the ailing metaverse — after rebranding as “Meta” from Facebook in 2021 — was seen by industry analysts as a “smart move, just late.” (Even Zuckerberg himself began to shy away from the metaverse in earnings calls as early as 2023, as the whole project crumbled.)
All that said, it remains to be seen if the push toward AI-powered “wearables” is any more successful than Zuckerberg’s infamous foray into virtual reality.
Last week, Meta had to pause international shipments of its AI smart glasses due to inventory problems, as analysts warn that international privacy regulations and an oversaturated market could limit their sales overall.
Not to be deterred, Bloomberg recently revealed that Meta execs had discussed whether to double the total production run of the AI specs, from 10 million units to 20 million. A source familiar with the matter told the publication that production could reach as many as 30 million units by the end of 2026, assuming demand justifies the supply bump.
So while the future of the AI smart glasses remains uncertain, one thing’s for sure: the metaverse, in all its clunky glory, is winding down for good.
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