{"id":426316,"date":"2026-01-20T21:49:08","date_gmt":"2026-01-20T21:49:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/426316\/"},"modified":"2026-01-20T21:49:08","modified_gmt":"2026-01-20T21:49:08","slug":"meta-formerly-known-as-facebook-lays-off-1500-workers-as-its-metaverse-division-crumples","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/426316\/","title":{"rendered":"Meta, formerly known as Facebook, lays off 1500 workers as its metaverse division crumples"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Fellas, is it a bad look if you rename your company to focus on the metaverse and then decide later to nuke that metaverse ambition? That\u2019s just some of the egg on the face of Mark Zuckerberg, though the Facebook\/Meta CEO\u2019s failure naturally means that other people \u2013 1,500 of them to be exact \u2013 are paying the price instead of him, as that\u2019s the number of workers who have been laid off<\/a> as a result of the company\u2019s end to its attempt to popularize the metaverse.<\/p>\n

The layoffs, which impact 10% of Meta\u2019s workforce and saw its in-house Reality Labs shutter, also saw three virtual reality-specific gaming studios owned by the company shut down as well<\/a>. Meta\u2019s own Horizon Worlds VR game platform will still operate, though in a diminished capacity. The layoffs are part of Facebook\u2019s wider plan to move away from metaverse development and towards AI and wearable tech, according to a statement provided to IGN.<\/p>\n

The gamble on creating a metaverse was an almost immediate money sink for the company, costing it over $60 billion since 2020. Of course, we can certainly point out that Zuck\u2019s idea of a metaverse and one proposed by an actual seasoned game dev are<\/a> not<\/a> the<\/a> same<\/a>, but that\u2019s hardly a salve for the thousands who now have to navigate a tumultuous industry<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Fellas, is it a bad look if you rename your company to focus on the metaverse and then…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":426317,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[64,63,105,238,239,240],"class_list":["post-426316","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-virtual-reality","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-technology","tag-virtual-reality","tag-virtualreality","tag-vr"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/426316","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=426316"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/426316\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/426317"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=426316"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=426316"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=426316"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}