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Silicon Valley tech CEOs are not big fans of metaverses

Disney’s CEO said the company doesn’t tend to use the word metaverse, as it believes it’s a very broad term.

During a Wall Street Journal event, Microsoft gaming chief Phil Spencer and Snap CEO Evan Spiegel revealed that they are not big fans of the metaverse in its current form.

Spencer called the metaverse’s current iteration a “poorly built video game,” referring to the ecosystem’s bad graphics and low-quality interfaces.

The Microsoft gaming chief noted that the gaming world still has an advantage over the metaverse in creating different engaging virtual worlds. At the same time, he compared most of the current metaverse projects to virtual reality room meetings and explained:

“Video game creators have an amazing ability to build compelling worlds that we want to go spend time in. […] For me, building a metaverse that looks like a meeting room… I just find that’s not where I want to spend most of my time.”

Spiegel, on the other hand, compared the metaverse experience to “living inside a computer” and hinted that the current iterations of the concept are very basic, and he won’t feel like spending time inside it after a long day of work.

He added that Snap is more focused on minimizing the hardware and bringing the experience to the real world through augmented reality (AR), taking a swipe at the virtual reality (VR) hardware trend in the metaverse.

VR creates an immersive virtual environment, while AR augments a real-world scene. VR requires a headset device, while AR does not. VR users move in a completely fictional world, while AR users are in contact with the real world.

Related: Meta’s Web3 hopes face challenge of decentralization and market headwinds

Apple senior vice president of worldwide marketing Greg Joswiak said that the metaverse is “a word I’ll never use,” reflecting on Apple’s focus on AR over VR. While Disney CEO Bob Chapek said the company tends “not to use” the word metaverse “because, for us, that’s a big, broad term. For us, it’s next-generation storytelling.”

Metaverse as a concept became the next big thing in the Web3 ecosystem during the peak of the bull run, with Facebook even rebranding itself to Meta to showcase its focus on becoming a leader in the nascent tech ecosystem. However, Meta’s metaverse bet has proved costly for the Fortune 500 company, as the firm posted a $3.67-billion loss for the third quarter of 2022, stating those losses will further deepen next year.

Snapchat’s parent company shutters Web3 division amid layoffs

The company said it will let go of its Web3 division to make way for restructuring after falling behind financial targets.

Snap Inc’s CEO Evan Speigel announced in a note on Friday that the company had made the difficult decision to reduce the size of its workforce by approximately 20%. 

The note said that this round of layoffs comes after the company experienced slow revenue growth, a slump in stock prices, and a general lag behind its financial targets. Speigel shared:

“Our forward-looking revenue visibility remains limited, and our current year-over-year QTD revenue growth of 8% is well below what we were expecting earlier this year.”

Snap Inc. will now undertake the task of restructuring in an attempt to ensure the company’s success in a highly competitive space where Instagram and TikTok are currently dominating. As part of its restructuring process, the company has axed its entire Web3 team. Jake Sheinman, head of Snap’s Web3 team, announced his exit from the company on Wednesday in a series of posts on Twitter stating:

“As a result of the company restructure, decisions were made to sunset our web 3 team.”

CEO Speigel shared that the restructuring is a part of an effort to focus on three strategic priorities; namely, community growth, revenue growth and augmented reality (AR). Projects that are not in alignment with these areas will be discontinued or have their budgets slashed significantly.

At the moment, it appears that Snap will not be prioritizing the budding Web3 and Metaverse space as much as its competition, such as Meta. Although many tech innovators seem to share the opinion that Web3 is going to be the next iteration of the internet, Snap does not appear interested in positioning itself within the blockchain industry.

Snap’s layoffs come after other tech companies like Coinbase, LinkedIn, Meta, Apple, Google and Netflix have had to cut down their workforce due to rising interest rates in an inflationary economy.