Metaverse, end of a short love story for Meta, Microsoft and Disney?
Generative AI has stolen the limelight from the metaverse and Meta, Microsoft and Disney, having invested so much in it, are practically dismantling entire departments. All the details
When the metaverse hit the world stage in October 2021, it was thought to be the next big thing in technology, however, the recent curiosity about generative AI seems to be shifting interest – and destination of investments – of Big Tech.
Will it be the end of the virtual world of which Mark Zuckerberg was one of the major proponents?
BIRTH (AND DEATH?) OF THE METAVERSE
The term metaverse, used for the first time in 1992 by the writer Neal Stephenson in his science fiction novel Snow Crash , has become, so to speak, more concrete precisely with Zuckerberg who has revived the concept with the creation of a 3D online universe that integrates a number of different virtual spaces and allows users to interact, trade, work, meet, play and even socialize.
Although not only Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, owned by Meta, but also Microsoft, NVidia, Google, Disney, Unity Technology, Roblox Corporation, Amazon, Animoca Brands, Epic Games, Decentraland and Binance have dived into it, the project is not never really took off and today it could end altogether.
THE THUD OF META
Zuckerberg, who even renamed Facebook with the name Meta, made the metaverse popular thanks to the more than 2 billion users registered on his social networks. However, after investing $36 billion in it "despite the reservations of its partners, it is abandoning the technology," writes Quartz .
2023, Meta announced , will be "the year of efficiency" and for this reason it will focus "on reducing costs and rationalizing projects".
As Quartz recalls, since the company embarked on this venture, its value "has suffered one steep dive after another and the losses keep piling up." The Guardian said last December that Meta had already cut at least 11,000 jobs (13% of the workforce) to keep its metaverse project afloat, but that hasn't helped and it now plans to cut another 10,000 jobs .
“The poor results of the third quarter – reads the British newspaper – caused Meta's share price to fall by 25%, deleting 80 billion dollars from the value of the company. Reality Labs, the Metaverse division of Meta, has lost $3.7 billion in the past three months and the worst is expected to come.
EVEN DISNEY STOP DREAMING
But Zuckerberg is not the only one having to face reality. Disney has also said it will shut down its 50-person Metaverse division and plans to lay off up to 7,000 employees over the next two months in hopes of improving earnings.
“Many companies and enterprises understandably think that if they need to reduce headcount or spend in general, this type of category would seem to be a pretty easy target,” Scott Kessler, technology industry analyst at the company, told The Wall Street Journal . research group Third Bridge Group.
MICROSOFT FOCUSES ON AI
Even Microsoft, which had bet heavily on the metaverse, is closing dedicated departments to focus on generative artificial intelligence with the incorporation of a chatbot into its Bing platform.
WHY THE METAVERSE DIDN'T WORK
According to the experts cited by Quartz , the metaverse fails to spread both for some practical aspects, such as devices that are too bulky, but above all because of its costs, which do not make it a mass technology.
For Benjamin Arunda, blockchain expert and founder of ChainAdvise, "there is still a long way to go" and changes should be made, but the metaverse is not over yet: "Gadgets […] should be as light as glasses and accessible and available like smartphones, they should also be equipped with eye and ear safety measures.”
The most critical however believe that the costs are prohibitive for its use on a large scale and that in any case it does not really meet everyone's interest.
“The enthusiasm for the metaverse is over,” said Egline Samoei, an emerging technology expert based in Nairobi. “But the real challenge was the cost of the metaverse. It's not inclusive, the software and gadgets are too expensive”.
“People are still googling the meaning of the metaverse. Again, it caters only to games, art and fashion” commented Barbara Moran-Goodrich, founder of Brand Moran, stating that “it doesn't meet many people's needs”.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/innovazione/metaverso-fine-di-una-breve-storia-damore-per-meta-microsoft-e-disney/ on Wed, 05 Apr 2023 06:02:35 +0000.