The Metaverse industry is already going belly-up for reasons we can't imagine

A spate of layoffs and closures in the burgeoning Metaverse Industrial Complex is proving what many critics have said all along — that over-investment was never going to be enough to breathe life into the hype-poisoned space.

As Insider reports, recent virtual reality-related layoffs and division closures are indicative of a larger trend that almost everyone saw coming from the start: that the tech itself wasn't advancing anywhere near as fast as the billions of dollars of speculative investments, and that the whole house of cards was doomed to collapse, especially in the face of economic headwinds.

As Bloomberg reported last month, Microsoft's sacking of a whopping 10k people included deep cuts at the company's notorious mixed-reality HoloLens division, which has in recent months garnered bad press because the Army officials who tested the $6,000-a-pop goggles said that they were dangerously and poorly designed

Along with the layoffs that affected roughly five percent of its entire workforce, Microsoft also announced that it's shuttering AltspaceVR, a social media virtual reality platform that was launched almost a decade ago and purchased by the tech giant in 2017.

The reality:

Besides Microsoft's woes, Bloomberg said that Apple is backburning sophisticated augmented reality glasses in favor of pushing forward on a cheaper version.

Perhaps most jarringly, this Big Tech shuttering and layoffs were predicted in November by the company formerly known as Facebook, which quite literally changed its name to "Meta" in 2021, laying off 11k workers, including some from its Reality Labs VR division.

Since Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg first began talking openly about his metaverse moonshot, all evidence has indicated that it both looked and operated like crap. Just a few months after the name change, Meta set the record for the biggest single-day selloff ever as investors became overwhelmingly spooked by how much bad press the company was getting for its shoddy VR platform.

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