Meta VR exec opens up after CEO Mark Zuckerberg cuts his dream team’s budget and laid off 1000+ employees: Can tell you personally that we…
A Meta executive broke his silence on the company’s VR future this week, directly addressing growing fears that the tech giant is abandoning virtual reality. Dilmer Valecillos, a Developer Advocate at Meta, jumped into a conversation on X to set the record straight: “I can tell you personally that we are not getting out of VR.“His comment came after VR content creator Matt voiced what many in the community were thinking—that Meta’s recent layoffs and radio silence were raising serious red flags. Valecillos didn’t just offer empty reassurances. He revealed he’s now working on a team “fully focused on VR programs and education,” adding that he wouldn’t be doing this work if he didn’t believe VR had a real future.The timing matters. Meta just cut roughly 1,500 people from Reality Labs, the division building its VR headsets and metaverse projects. That’s about 10% of the team gone in one sweep.
Zuckerberg doubles down on AI glasses as metaverse dreams fade
Mark Zuckerberg is making a hard pivot. The CEO is pulling money away from metaverse projects and pumping it into AI-powered wearables instead. Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses have become an unexpected hit, selling over 2 million pairs. Demand in the US has been so strong that the company delayed its international rollout.Meanwhile, the metaverse bet hasn’t paid off. Horizon Worlds, the virtual social platform Zuckerberg once championed as the future, never cracked 200,000 monthly users. Most of the user-created worlds sat empty. Meta renamed itself from Facebook in 2021, staking everything on this vision. Reality Labs has burned through more than $70 billion since 2020 with little to show for it.The company is now spending between $70 billion and $72 billion on AI infrastructure, with plans to increase that figure this year.
Studios shuttered, fitness app shelved as Meta redefines VR strategy
The cuts hit hard across Meta’s VR operations. The company closed studios like Armature, Twisted Pixel, and Sanzaru outright. Supernatural, a VR fitness app Meta bought for $400 million just two years ago, got moved to maintenance mode—basically a skeleton crew keeping the lights on with no new content coming.Interestingly, Palmer Luckey, who founded Oculus before Meta acquired it, defended the layoffs. He argued Meta’s own game studios were actually hurting the VR ecosystem by crowding out independent developers with heavily subsidized titles. It’s a tough-love take, but he framed the cuts as getting back to Oculus’s original playbook of supporting third-party creators rather than competing with them.Meta hasn’t issued any formal statement addressing what this all means for Quest headsets or VR development going forward.
