Mag-log in bilang miyembro
Kabilang ang mga gumagawa ng Marvel's Deadpool VR at Asgard's Wrath.
"Hello everyone and welcome back to GRTV News, today we are going to be talking about something that broke at the end of yesterday, another quite demoralising story I would say, we talk about layoffs quite frequently and granted, admittedly, the conversation around layoffs has significantly slowed down compared to where it was in I think 2023 and 2024, but it still happens, we still frequently get these development news stories that talk about studios being shut down, people losing their jobs, games being cancelled, all that stuff and today the particular emphasis is on virtual reality because one of the big major players really that was left in the virtual reality space was meta, because of Mark Zuckerberg's dream really of this metaverse that he wanted to create, the problem with VR is that it's never really taken off and it's an expensive technology to get into, even with the accessibility of the Quest headsets and it still costs a lot of money to make video games for virtual reality systems and if the technology's not taken off then you could probably say that the sales for the games probably haven't taken off and it all falls into line to the point where you start questioning the actual sort of economics relevance of the virtual reality video game sector and to this end, meta has now decided to shut down a few of its studios that work in the VR space and it's a little bit disappointing because they're quite well known studios, I mean granted there aren't many VR studios these days, but they are quite well known studios when you look at the VR world, so anyway, let's dive on in."
"Meta shuts down Twisted Pixel and Sanzaru games, another shift from VR games that comes after years of heavy losses and unfulfilled metaverse ambitions, so yeah, meta has confirmed that both Twisted Pixel games and Sanzaru games have been shut down as part of a larger restructuring within the company's reality labs division. It has also been reported that meta is looking to cut an additional 10% of its workforce within VR in order to save costs and shift more towards AI. Twisted Pixel, which was responsible for, among other things, Marvel's Deadpool VR and Splosion Man, as well as Sanzaru, the developer of the Asgard's Wrath series, have both been confirmed to have closed their doors. With all employees being let go, some of them took to social media to share the sad news. Reality Labs has been suffering significant losses for several years and has been part of these larger so-called metaverse dream, which, as we know, has not exactly been the runaway success that Meta and Zuckerberg initially hoped for. This is not the first time Meta has shut down VR teams. Ready at Dawn was shut down just two years ago in the same manner, but this truly marks Meta's clear shift away from VR games. We wish all those who have been affected with the best of luck in the future. And this is an embedded tweet relating to one of the folks that worked at Twisted Pixel. So, um, yeah, quite sad news across the board really. But, you know, again, we've been seeing Meta sort of play around with the idea of where its future lies in the world of VR and this metaverse thing, because at the end of the day, while these big tech companies have a lot of money to throw around and do, you know, explore these different areas, VR and the idea of a metaverse has been something that they've been exploring for quite some while, for some time now, and it hasn't been successful."
"It hasn't taken off. You know, there's lots of technology that right now is booming. You know, you look at AI, everyone's investing in AI. It's bubbling to the point where, or ballooning to a point where it's going to burst and it will burst because it's unsustainable the amount of money they're pumping into it. But VR, they've been doing it for so long and it's never really taken off and the technology's gotten better, yes, but it's only got marginally better really when you compare it to where it's been. It's become more affordable mainly than anything, but it hasn't really become, you know, head and shoulders different to what VR was a decade ago. And it looks like Meta's got to the point with its venture into the world of VR and it's kind of said, well, maybe there's not a future here. And this is why these studios are being shut down. And the sad thing about these studios being shut down is because they have experience elsewhere. You know, you look at Twisted Pixel who recently did Melville's Deadpool VR, which by the way, is one of the better VR games you'll ever play. You know, surely there's a world where that game, or, you know, you can use that game as a template to make a single player Deadpool game that's not VR related, you know, and they have experience making on VR games because they delivered the Explosion Man series in the past. So, you know, there's creativity at these studios that was being, that can be tapped, that hasn't been tapped, and instead they've been shut down and that's the end of it. So I don't know, we'll see what happens here, but I think this is probably a, as Marcus puts in the news piece, this is probably a signal that the Metaverse endeavor for Facebook, for Meta as a company, is coming to a close and that they'll be investing their resources, probably more into the AI systems that they all have and what not, but we'll see. But yeah, long story short, several VR studios have been shut down and it's not good news for the world of Meta VR at the least. But yeah, that's all the time that I have, so thank you for joining me. I'll be back now though tomorrow for the next GOT News of the Week, so until then, I hope you enjoy the rest of your Wednesday."
