Karissa Bell, Engadget:
Several of Meta’s VR studios have been affected by the company’s
metaverse-focused layoffs. The company has shuttered three of its
VR studios, including Armature, Sanzaru and Twisted Pixel. VR
fitness app Supernatural will no longer be updated with fresh
content.Employees at Twisted Pixel, which released Marvel’s Deadpool VR
in November, and Sanzaru, known for Asgard’s Wrath,
posted on social media about the closures.
Bloomberg reported that Armature, which brought Resident
Evil 4 to Quest back in 2021 has also closed and that the
popular VR fitness app Supernatural will no longer get updates.“Due to recent organizational changes to our Studio, Supernatural
will no longer receive new content or feature updates starting
today,” the company wrote in an update on Facebook. The app
“will remain active” for existing users. […]The cuts raise questions about Meta’s commitment to supporting a
VR ecosystem it has invested heavily in.
Raises questions, indeed! It was only four years ago that Mark Zuckerberg renamed the company from Facebook to Meta and proclaimed the entire company would now be “metaverse-first”.
A reader told me today that a friend of his who works (well, worked) at one of Meta’s now-shuttered VR studios was vaguely concerned just last weekend because he suspected “about 20 percent” of the company to be laid off. Not him, but probably some people he was required to stack-rank. Turns out he was correct to be worried but his “about 20 percent” guess was off by … checks with calculator … about 80 percent. People within Meta who believed Zuckerberg’s public statements have clearly been caught flat-footed by the fact that he’s clearly lost all interest in VR and the so-called metaverse.
The workout app Supernatural is a perfect example. Meta announced their intention to acquire Supernatural in 2021, at the start of their all-in-on-the-metaverse phase, for $400 million. They battled the FTC for approval and it finally went through in February 2023. Now, less than three years later, they’re shutting it down. Devoted Supernatural users are, unsurprisingly, not happy.
It really does raise questions about Meta’s commitment.
