In news no one wanted to wake up to, Meta started laying off 10% of its Reality Labs division — that’s the one that handles all the spatial computing initiatives — this week.

As of this writing Bloomberg reports and both Upload VR and The Verge confirm that three studios have been shut down: Twisted Pixel Games (Marvel’s Deadpool VR), Sanzaru Games (Asgard’s Wrath), and Armature Studio (Resident Evil 4 VR). The workout app Supernatural is no longer going to receive new content, which means the much loved coaches who were the heart of app are surely out of jobs.

To be sure, there are still VR studios at work inside Meta, including Beat Games (Beat Saber) and Camouflaj (Batman: Arkham Shadow) but if you were looking to Meta to have a robust first party lineup of games for their mixed reality headsets you can pretty much kiss that hope goodbye.

There’s a lot to be frustrated by here.

Meta spent their vast resources years ago acquiring some generational game talent to build out what was then called the Oculus Studios, and then got distracted with the boondoggle that was and is Horizon Worlds. The Meta vision of the metaverse never coalesced into anything more than an abandoned mall, and ate up a whole lot of money doing so. 

Instead of, you know, taking the time to make people excited about the actually great games their talented studios were making. 

Meta’s faith in their own taste at the C-suite level and the ability of the mystic algorithm to create demand is sorely miscalculated, and they are counting on both of those to get smart glasses over with the general population in the belief that millions and millions of people will want to wear a digital display on their face constantly for ambient computing.

It would be funny if it wasn’t coming at the expense of an entire era of video games being effectively lost.

In a lot of ways this all goes back to the arrival of the Oculus in the public eye with the wildly successful Kickstarter and the acquisition by the then Facebook not long after. It was, in so many ways, an accident. Let’s be honest: the Rift wasn’t ready for primetime, and the arms race that ensued only made the general population wary. Headache inducing phone driven VR videos distributed by Google didn’t help. Nor did the vaporware that was Magic Leap, convincing investors to leap frog over VR for an AR future where “we’ll figure out the physics later” was part of the pitch.

I often think VR would have been better served if it had been allowed to bake in the labs of USC and Carnegie Mellon for a few years more. Letting pioneers like Nonny de la Peña and Chris Milk demonstrate its power as storytelling medium for a few more cycles before starting a gold rush by the exceptionally twitchy Silicon Valley venture capitalist set.

What hurts though is that in spite of the boom and bust cycles in the market the artists and engineers who were summoned by Meta to make games did some pretty great work. 

No one may look cool in wearing a VR headset from the outside, but you end up feeling pretty damn cool. As Batman. As Deadpool. As Leanne Pedante encourages you to push a little further in that workout. At a broader scale than any piece of immersive theatre, theme park attraction, or elaborately designed escape room the games that the Reality Labs studios made have demonstrated the power that comes from getting audiences to embody characters.

Yet the challenge of actually building an audience for this work seems to be one that no company wants to take on. Some will say it’s because the audience isn’t there, but I know that’s myopia talking. The human instinct for what we might awkwardly call “embodied make believe” lives within all of us. Often times all it takes is giving people the permission to exercise that instinct to get them to reconnect with the joy it provides.

Joy doesn’t seem to the on the corporate agenda these days. Nor does anything that makes people aware that they do have agency. Better to perfect the algorithm and get everyone into a nice digital feed. 

Maybe the early cyberpunk authors had it right in depicting virtual reality tech as a corporate tool that gets subverted for outlaw purposes. A platform that’s hacked to allow for personal liberation. Perhaps it’s for the best that the big corps walk away and leave this space to the independent studios and real weirdos.

Still, I can’t help but mourn a world where all this wasn’t an uphill battle. I have to mourn the loss of all these jobs and the human toll it will inflict on some really great creatives in the face of an economy that is subject to the whims of madmen. 

But the genie is out of the bottle, and those of us who have seen how good it can get won’t stop chasing that vision of a medium where the only limit is the borders of imagination.

Until Spring, my friends.

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