Disney closes the chapter on Metaverse
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This week, Disney had shut down its Metaverse Unit as a part of the first wave of layoffs. The entertainment brand’s elimination of a 50-person metaverse team, which was once championed by former chief executive officer Bob Chapek, indicates that it is on the trailing edge of studios letting disappointing VR experiments quietly die.
The Walt Disney Company’s goal was to "create an entirely new paradigm for how audiences experience and engage with our stories."?
Headed by Mike White, a former Disney consumer-products executive, the unit’s responsibility was to discover means to narrate interactive stories by captivating innovative technological formats. The division leveraged Disney's vast collection of intellectual property with metaverse, which includes Marvel, Pixar and Star Wars.
In November, Bob Chapek, then chief executive officer of Disney, had described the metaverse as “the next great storytelling frontier.” While Bob Iger, chief executive officer of Disney, has also been optimistic about the metaverse.
Iger told employees in a Monday memo that layoffs would begin this week, seeking to reduce the headcount by 7,000 over the next two months.
The pressure from investors and tech companies to cut costs and the slow growth in the popularity of the metaverse seems to have led to the dissolution of the entire division. It would result in impacting several major divisions of the company – Disney entertainment, Disney parks, metaverse experiences, products and corporate.
Disney isn’t the only company giving the best shot to deliver on its big metaverse aspirations. In the recent year, even Meta, the biggest champion of the metaverse, has struggled to build adoption. Its first major virtual reality (VR) headset released after the rebrand of the Meta Quest Pro, was a misfortune and its Reality Labs division reported an operating loss of USD 13.72 billion last year.?
Disney had planned to bring fantasy sports, theme park experience and more to future storytelling with metaverse. However, with the metaverse universe coming to a close for now, the future of the big company’s metaverse ambitions remains unclear.
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