Chapter 1: What led Meta to abandon its Metaverse project?
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Chapter 2: Why did the Metaverse fail to attract a significant user base?
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Chapter 3: What financial impact did the Metaverse project have on Meta?
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Chapter 4: How is Meta shifting its focus towards AI technologies?
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Chapter 5: What are the implications of Meta's shift to AI for business models?
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Over the last half of a decade, Meta has made an absolutely colossal investment into the quote-unquote metaverse, and it might finally be coming to an end as Meta is starting to focus more on AI and growth there. and it feels like the metaverse was a dream of Zuckerberg's that never really materialized.
Chapter 6: How are Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses performing in the market?
All of this has happened as roughly 1,500 employees from the Reality Labs division are being laid off over at Facebook, and there's a whole bunch of VR game studios that are getting shut down, according to a report over in the Wall Street Journal.
This is kind of like a dramatic moment, I think, for meta, which was just, you know, four years ago, rebuilding its entire identity around the metaverse and everything going on there. So today on the podcast, I want to break down where we are today, where we've come from and how we arrived at this moment. What's next?
Because I think what's next is even more exciting than getting lost in the metaverse for endless hours at a time. and I think it's probably a more optimistic view of the future. But spoiler alert, it includes a lot of technology still being involved. So let's get into the podcast today.
Before we do, if you want to be able to build tools, if you're not a developer, I'm not a developer, I built a platform called AIbox.ai where you can vibe code AI tools. You explain what you want to build, and our builder will automatically link together multiple AI models,
Chapter 7: What challenges did Meta face in the VR market?
put in prompts, and build a tool for you. So it automates the whole automation. You can then go use those and share those. If you want to check it out, it's linked in the description. It is AIbox.ai. All right, let's get into the podcast. The first thing I want to say is I don't think there's a lot of people crying right now over the metaverse, feeling like it is collapsing, essentially.
Back in 2021, Facebook rebranded themselves as Meta. And they said, you know, there's going to be this new era of virtual reality. It was definitely a big shift from basically focusing themselves on social media.
Chapter 8: What does the future hold for Meta's AI initiatives?
They're kind of like a new company. It was like a big new marketing thing. Part of the strategy hinged on they kind of had this belief that Gen Z was going to prefer to socialize inside of online games like Fortnite and Roblox instead of on sort of feed based apps like Instagram. So, of course, they did this big name change thing.
And also this the name change had another purpose, which basically was to distance them from they had a lot of years of reputational damage tied to Facebook. So at that point, the brand was kind of they had the whole Cambridge Analytica data scandal. And there's a bunch of like internal documents and whistleblower things that were basically just making Facebook's brand not as good.
And in how, you know, there's a bunch of whistleblowers and how it was harming teens and children. And there's all of these like congressional hearings over surveillance and misinformation and then allegations of them being a monopoly and then allegations of censorship. And then, you know, like there's just so much drama with the whole Facebook thing. So rebrand, call it meta.
Um, and they were just like, look, here's our new vision. We're going to build the metaverse. It's going to become the next great social platform. It's going to be, you know, a virtual world users are going to gather. They had horizon worlds was kind of the main app or hub where they did that.
Um, and they, you know, they said like, everyone's going to play and work and socialize using metas VR headsets. Okay. Awesome. And to be fair, I purchased a meta VR headset and played some games on there over a Christmas break, you know, between Christmas and new years, it was kind of fun. Then it sat in my closet and I never used it for a couple of years. So
I think that was probably experience a lot of people had. It's kind of a novelty. It was kind of fun. Also kind of gave you a headache and you kind of just moved on. So I think because of that, the vision today of this huge metaverse, I mean, they were spending, you know, $10 billion, over $10 billion, I think a quarter or a year, like just absolutely astronomical amounts of money on this.
So according to CNBC, they've now made a whole bunch of cuts. Over 1500 people have been let go. And this is hitting a whole bunch of internal studios. So there's Amateur Studios, which was working on Resident Evil 4 VR. There's Twisted Pixel, which is kind of known for Marvel's Deadpool VR. There's Sanzaru, who's the creative of Asgard's Wrath.
The VR fitness app Supernatural, which personally was one of my favorite when I had a VR headset. It was actually acquired by Meta in 2023 for about $400 million dollars. But they're going to stop producing any new content and they're just going to shift into maintenance mode. So Camouflage, who's the studio behind Batman Arkham Shadow. has also seen a bunch of layoffs, according to GeekWire.
So I think The Verge also reported that Workrooms, which is Meta's attempt to bring, you know, VR into the workspace, is also shutting down as well. I basically think all of these are not great signs for Zuckerberg's Metaverse. And Bloomberg already did a report back in December that said that Meta was planning to cut the VR division's budget by as much as 30%.
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