Microsoft has shut down their metaverse team for unknown reasons.
The company’s industrial metaverse team was pushed aside this week after waning metaverse interest.
All 100 employees of the team have been disbanded.
Microsoft shuts down industrial metaverse team
The aim of the industrial metaverse project was to encourage the retail, financial, and health industries to use the metaverse. The team, created in October 2022, was disolved only four months after it was created.
Sources indicate that Microsoft closed the metaverse team down to focus on other short-term projects. With interest in the metaverse dwindling and Facebook losing more than $80 billion since prioritising metaverse development, Microsoft may simply be cutting some losses.
Metaverse projects and companies in the cryptocurrency market have not been performing too well since the bull run. In late 2022 the player base for Decentraland sat at around 8,000 users, lower than most old multiplayer PC games such as Left for Dead 2. The Sandbox’s native SAND token is down 91% from its November 2021 all-time high of $8.40.
Despite concerns about the metaverse and its use cases, some crypto projects, such as Shiba Inu, are jumping right in. A Shiba Inu metaverse is due to launch in the near future and integrate itself into the existing Shiba Inu ecosystem.