from the Minnie's-avatar-was-lame-anyway dept.
Disney appears to be the latest company to pull back the metaverse, as CEO Bob Iger reverses more decisions from his predecessor:
The entertainment giant's metaverse team has reportedly been eliminated as part of the ongoing round of job cuts at Disney. The Wall Street Journal reports all 50 team members who were developing the company's metaverse strategies have been let go.
The metaverse was a pet project of former CEO Bob Chapek, who called it "the next great storytelling frontier."
[...] Last November, however, Chapek was unceremoniously dismissed from Disney. And Bob Iger returned to the CEO role, quickly reversing several of Chapek's decisions.
The metaverse ambitions appear to be the latest to be targeted by Iger. Despite the many ideas that were publicly floated, the metaverse unit had apparently not made much progress on the new technology and did not have many clear plans in place.
Originally spotted on The Eponymous Pickle.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Opportunist on Thursday March 30 2023, @04:57AM
Considering how long it usually takes Disney to understand when they are trying to get a dead horse to run faster, this is ... let's say not really good news for the Metastasis.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by looorg on Thursday March 30 2023, @06:03AM (13 children)
I don't think Disney, or any large enough company, really does scrapping. Think of it more like put in the vault or freezer. Things are on hold until the market becomes a bit more clear. They won't invest to push Metaverse (which ever version comes out the winner) into the next great thing but if it turns out to be the next great thing due to the work of others they'll quickly defrost their program and are ready to invest to jump the line to the forefront again as needed. That said Meta/Facebook etc are probably not to happy cause Disney could probably have been one of the few companies that had pulled in and hooked the kids and their parents. Now they are left with a few game companies and the p0rn-people. The other companies that do it for business things don't care about it being entertaining of fun, they do it cause it solves some work related problem, that said I don't think meta-meetings is the next great thing that will replace Teams/Zoom/whatever-meetings. If that was the case the development team meeting might as well have taken place in Azeroth 20 years (ish) ago or some other MMO rpg or action game that techinically have "avatars" and chat.
(Score: 3, Funny) by khallow on Thursday March 30 2023, @06:23AM (7 children)
They're laying off the group. Not keeping the knowledge around is a sure sign they're scrapping. They won't be any better off than if they started from scratch.
It's squandered opportunity. Think of all the loot they could have farmed from those massive raids.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Thursday March 30 2023, @06:27AM
The headache of managing the guild and leading those 40 man raids into the Molten Core sucked hard tho. It might have been better to just pay some chinese loot farmers to do it. Outsourcing ....
(Score: 1) by Runaway1956 on Thursday March 30 2023, @08:09AM (5 children)
But, that argument failed to convince G.W. Bush when he wanted to invade Iraq. Iraq's nuclear physicists were scattered around the world, mostly in private enterprise, but Bush insisted that Iraq still had a nuclear arms capability.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday March 30 2023, @11:23AM (3 children)
What does "private enterprise" mean in a fascist country? Not much. Keep in mind that Iraq had been playing a decade of whack-a-mole following its defeat in the Persian Gulf war. Scattering and reforming military and WMD assets is a thing they've done before. They hadn't made it easy to figure out whether or not they still had a nuclear arms capability.
And you can see in the US's post-war fumbling that they were convinced Iraq had been hiding it all along - just better this time. For example, the Assistant Secretary of Defense Abraham Wolfowitz was the first person to reveal that WMD hadn't been found - not his boss, Donald Rumsfeld or their boss, President George. H. W. Bush.
We still don't know if Iraq just moved the program out of the country with expectations that they'd move it back in when western interest died down. Maybe they really had just hidden it better this time? There was suspicion that this had been moved to Syria though if it has been, nobody has used it in war as of this time.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday March 30 2023, @11:36AM (2 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 30 2023, @05:12PM (1 child)
I see, so the absence of evidence is evidence of not 1 but 2 conspiracies?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday March 30 2023, @06:30PM
What absence of evidence? For example, Iraq moved its air force out of the country ahead of both the Iraq-Iran war and the Persian Gulf war. I think to Sudan and Syria. And we have that decade of whack-a-mole WMD I mentioned last post. Moving military assets is a standard move here and Iraq had been moving its WMD programs around. The Wolfowitz story indicates that the Bush administration believed its own propaganda to the point they were greatly surprised when they couldn't find said WMD.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Mykl on Friday March 31 2023, @12:01AM
That's because GWB didn't invade Iraq to prevent nukes or other WMDs. They knew that there was nothing there, but GWB just wanted to finish what his dad started.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Opportunist on Thursday March 30 2023, @08:38AM (4 children)
If anything, Disney will launch its own Metastasis, just without blackjack and hookers, family friendly to the extreme and under their 100% control.
Letting anyone have any say what goes and what does not with their IP is very un-Disney.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by looorg on Thursday March 30 2023, @09:43AM (3 children)
Which feeds into the idea that more and more big companies are trying to or wanting to build their own walled gardens AOL-style or whatnot. Apple sure does want it, and they are probably not alone in their wet dream about how to control all their users -- what they see, hear or think. They should all just go and buy and resurrect AOL again but with a new fancy UI (VR or not). Splinternet deluxe or whatever you like to call it. To keep all the bad talk, ideas or people out. Think of the children etc etc. It's probably easier to capitalize your data/users if you control every aspect of their life.
(Score: 2) by Snospar on Thursday March 30 2023, @09:54AM (1 child)
Where's the "frightening" mod when you need it?
Also, what will those children do when the AOL CD's start coming through the letterbox?
Huge thanks to all the Soylent volunteers without whom this community (and this post) would not be possible.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Thursday March 30 2023, @09:57AM
They'll ask the kids that got the floppy disk version. No matter how hard they click on it it doesn't save their data.
Perhaps they can all upgrade it to a USB-stick (the once without explosives) or it could probably be simplified to a postcard with a QR code to download everything and shut them off from all the other scary splinternets out there.
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Thursday March 30 2023, @08:17PM
And that's exactly the reason why that whole shit is dead in the water.
You know that there are subcultures where VR thrives? Yes, indeed. VRChat is quite well populated by two kinds of people. The only two kinds of people who actually have a use for VR: Furries and cosplayers. For exactly the reason you might assume: In VR, they can finally pretend to be what or who they want to be. For "real". They can see and present their idealized self and needn't engage with boring reality where they are much but certainly not their idealized self.
That is your target audience.
And ... erh... well ... how should I put it... Neither of these cultures is known to be very "family friendly", if you catch my drift. If anything, either subculture is something a lot of people would only want to touch while wearing a hazmat suit. Trying to "family friendly" them will mean that they will leave. Or, if that's what you offer, just not sign up for it altogether.
This is why the Metastasis fails. This is why Disney would fail if they tried the same. The intersection between "people who want VR" and "people who are something you want to show your kids" is the empty set.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Thursday March 30 2023, @03:07PM
Its Disney there will be 7 sequels in 6 years, none of them any good.
(Score: 4, Informative) by VLM on Thursday March 30 2023, @03:18PM
Pretty sure there's more corporate people 'working' on the metaverse than actual endusers logged in.
If you google for number of metaverse users you'll get numbers like half a billion, mostly kids. The problem is those are fake hype generator numbers claiming fortnite, roblox, and minecraft players are "metaverse like" so they count as metaverse users. If you google for specific application like Meta's Horizon Worlds, the answer returned is about 200K 'users' where 'users' is the usual marketing fake-speak fuzziness, so real world non-marketing numbers are probably 20K when translated from marketing speak to human speech.
It's interesting to think that when Disney downsized this department, the people in that department were probably about a quarter of one percent of the current population of the metaverse based on the above numbers.
A meta-observation of the meta-verse is everything old is new again, so now that we're re-implementing video games like Second Life from the turn of the century, we can get ahead of the hype curve and look at cool games of 2010 to see what will be "new" in 2030s. I'll call it now; the 'new' fad of the 2030s to 2040s will be motion control like the Wii. Or maybe pokemon-go gps game will be resurrected in the 2030s.