“Zuckerberg misled everyone, burned tens of billions of dollars, convinced an industry of followers to submit to his quixotic obsession, and then killed it the second that another idea started to interest Wall Street,” he writes.

He lays a great deal of responsibility for the hype at the feet - or in the space below the floating torso - of one man. Zuckerberg declared in a March update that Meta’s “single largest investment is advancing AI and building it into every one of our products.”

The billions of dollars invested and the breathless hype around a half-baked concept led to thousands - if not tens of thousands - of people losing their jobs.īut the Metaverse was officially pulled off life support when it became clear that Zuckerberg and the company that launched the craze had moved on to greener financial pastures. Disney shuttered its Metaverse division in March, and Walmart followed suit by ending its Roblox-based Metaverse projects. Microsoft shuttered its virtual-workspace platform AltSpaceVR in January 2023, laid off the 100 members of its “industrial metaverse team,” and made a series of cuts to its HoloLens team. The Metaverse fell seriously ill as the economy slowed and the hype around generative AI grew. In an obituary published on Insider, Ed Zitron suggests the ultimate cause of death was the arrival of yet another next big thing: The metaverse was a term in search of a trend a trope in search of instantiation a failed act of summoning by leaders who really thought they could control the weather. Legless avatars beckoned us into barren digital landscapes to … stand around and talk about NFTs? Parcels of “property” sold for millions of dollars? It was a … virtual world? No? A mixed-reality game? No? A new frontier? An escape from meatspace? A layer on top of it? Companies raised and spent billions of dollars on the metaverse without ever quite getting their stories straight about what it was supposed to be or do - they didn’t just lack a good pitch beyond “getting in early,” they lacked a coherent concept to pitch in the first place. A few years on, Silicon Valley’s brief obsession with the metaverse has assumed the quality of a bad dream, half-remembered.

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