Facebook it was experiencing one of its worst reputational crises in its history. The mistrust of regulators and users had skyrocketed after a former engineer from the social networkFrances Haugen, leaked to the press internal documents in which it was proved that the directive turned a blind eye to the avalanche of disinformation and harmful content for mental health that circulated on their platforms.
mark zuckerberg He had a brilliant idea to put the scandal behind him. On October 28, 2021, the company was renamed Meta and pivoted its business towards the so-called metaversea new immersive digital environment yet to be defined that aims to be a Internet in 3D.
Facebook set the pace for the technology industry. The promise that the future of the network passed through the virtual reality (RV) seduced large companies from around the world, who went on to spend billions of euros trying to achieve that dream born of the Science fiction. The underlying promise was to squeeze that parallel universe to get as much revenue as possible from the emerging virtual economy, enabled by the so-called Web3 (cryptocurrencies, blockchain and NFTs). The siren songs of Silicon Valley They attracted everything from telemarketers to large investment funds, haute couture firms and artists.
Metaverse falls, AI rises
However, a year and a half later, all that initial enthusiasm seems to have faded. Global investment in the metaverse has gone from raising about $2 billion in the first three months of 2022 to $586 million in the same period this year, according to data from the venture capital firm PitchBook compiled by Axios. “It is normal that what we have seen of the metaverse is quite poor and that its development is slow and expensive, since there are still no computational capacities to recreate very realistic virtual environments,” explains analyst Antonio Ortiz, who compares it to the beginnings of the Mobile technology.
Meta’s division dedicated to developing the metaverse lost $10.2 billion in 2021 and $13.7 billion in 2022
On the one hand, the fall in popularity of VR is due to the ‘hype’ created around the AI, the new fashion to which the sector has been delivered. While the integration of chatbots capable of simulating a human conversation is being deployed under the promise of immediately accelerating productivity —an advertising formula yet to be tested— investment in the metaverse does not point to an economic return until the medium or long term. . Reality Labsthe Meta division dedicated to the development of RV products and services and augmented reality (RA), registered operating losses 10.2 billion dollars in 2021 and 13.7 billion more last year. That led Meta shareholders to denounce publicly that strategy.
Cuts in the sector
The other factor that has diminished this field is the economic turbulence that the sector is going through, which so far in 2023 has already Has fired to more than 166,000 people around the world, more than all of last year. After two decades of easy access to money, the inflation has led many companies to adopt cuts of personnel and investments.
The aforementioned letter from Zuckerberg was to announce a second round of 10,000 layoffs accelerated after Meta shares plunged 64.45% in 2022, leading to a 41% drop in its annual profits. yes in february Microsoft deleted his industrial metaverse divisionat the end of March did Disney.
colossal investment
The metaverse has receded into the background, but it hasn’t disappeared. a recent overall survey from the consultancy KPMG points out that 70% of the managers of large companies will invest less than 5% in the metaverse this year, but that 60% believe that, when it matures, it will be a “thriving commercial ecosystem”.
Thus, industry investment still colossal. Thus, Meta plans to launch a new generation of headphones this year, an improvement of the platform Horizon Worlds and a renewed version of questtheir VR glasses. And he will do it knowing that, this year, the “long-term” investment (between 10 or 15 years) will mean even higher losses.
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It’s not the only one. Manzana could launch to compete in that market in the coming months with a helmet on which he has been working for seven years. nvidiathe seventh most valued company in the world, continues to bet on the construction of those spaces. Microsoft is the company that owns more patents of technology Related to the metaverse, it owns the popular virtual world Minecraft and is trying to close the purchase of the giant video game Activision Blizzard. ‘Gaming’ is the greatest current exponent of what the metaverse can be, which explains why companies like Epic Games —creator of Fortnite— o Unity and platforms like Roblox are among those that invest the most in this field. Others such as Samsung, Magic Leap, Adobe, Verizon, Intel, Snap, Baidu or LG also stand out in this race.
A study from the analytical firm IDC pointed out two weeks ago that the sale of VR glasses had deflated by 20.9% last year, but that between 2023 and 2027 it will skyrocket at a rate of 32% per year. “From text to audio and video, technology has always been more immersive,” says Ortiz. “I wouldn’t give the metaverse up for dead.”