In a recent development, it has been revealed that Meta is considering personnel layoffs inside its highly invested in the metaverse Reality Labs business.
According to sources speaking to Reuters, employees were informed about the imminent layoffs through an internal message posted to the Meta Workplace forum.
The Facebook Agile Silicon Team (FAST), a vital group with over 600 people, will be impacted by the workforce reductions. A move like that would compromise Mark Zuckerberg’s grand plan for augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR).
To launch its excursion into the metaverse, Meta is counting on a large investment of $10 billion in the next years. However, the business has struggled to build semiconductors for its AR-VR headsets that can successfully compete with those made by other suppliers.
The Reality Labs section of Meta (previously Facebook), which had ambitious plans for AR-VR and the metaverse, suffered catastrophic operational losses for the year 2022 totaling $13.7 billion.
Reality Labs’ Q4 revenue dropped by 17%, to $727 million, in the sector, mostly due to lower sales of the Quest 2 headset.
Internal papers that were discovered more than a year after Mark Zuckerberg first announced the metaverse project revealed challenges with “technical glitches, lukewarm user interest, and a lack of clear direction for achieving success.”
An influential long-term investor in Meta expressed worries about the company’s excessive expenditure on the metaverse in October of the year before, saying it was time to reevaluate to recover its competitive advantage.
Brad Gerstner, chair and CEO of Altimeter Capital, remarked on the metaverse and said that there was a great deal of misunderstanding about what it really meant.
Meta has significantly reduced its workforce during the previous year, eliminating around 21,000 positions across a variety of industries.
Recent releases from Meta include the Quest 3 mixed reality (MR) headset, which boasts a 30% increase in visual resolution and a 40% increase in audio loudness over the Quest 2 model.
