Goodbye to Mickey Mouse and his friends in the metaverse: Disney has decided to eliminate the division dedicated to experiences related to interactive narrative and will also lay off some 7,000 employees throughout the company in the next two months, according to sources related to this have revealed sector to The Wall Street Journal.
In this way, Disney joins other large companies such as Microsoft, which also announced massive layoffs a few weeks ago due to the withdrawal of the metaverse. Tencent also decided in February to go back and say goodbye to the virtual adventure for which Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, has bet so much and that does not quite come together.
Precisely Zuckerberg has gone from considering Meta as his great project to practically marginalizing it and pointing out that WhatsApp monetization will be his main source of business in the near future, a declaration of intent that does not leave the virtual proposal that promised to revolutionize in a good place. the market.
In any case, the now-defunct division of the metaverse that Disney has struck down was led by Mike White, a former consumer products executive for the entertainment megacorporation, and the team was tasked with finding ways to tell interactive stories based on extensive intellectual property. Of the brand.
The objective of this division was to make the public feel much more integrated into the Disney universe through a narrative intertwined with virtual reality, as revealed by the company’s previous CEO, Bob Chapek, who worked on the metaverse team and defined this world as “the next great frontier of storytelling.”
“For nearly 100 years, our company has defined and redefined entertainment by leveraging technology to bring stories to life in deeper and more powerful ways,” Chapek claimed in his opening speech kicking off Disney’s metaverse project and which is already closed in 2023.
Chapek considered the metaverse as the next level of entertainment: “Today we have the opportunity to connect those universes and create a totally new paradigm for the public to experience our stories and engage with them… It is the so-called metaverse,” he assured his audience. workers.
However, the ambitions of Chapek and company have foundered under the watchful eye of the Mickey Mouse brand, as there was no concrete direction with the metaverse project and Disney preferred to employ its technology in fantasy sports, theme park attractions and other consumer experiences.
To all this is added the pressure from investors to Disney so that they do not invest in non-essential businesses, and the metaverse had all the numbers to enter the pools of elimination, coinciding with this context of cost reduction that the giant of the world entertainment.
On the other hand, Disney has also decided to abandon the project in which White was involved for an affiliation similar to Amazon’s Prime program that would integrate customer data on various Disney platforms, such as the Disney streaming service, sales operations online and smartphone apps Disney theme park guests use to purchase food, merchandise and other items.
The slow growth of the metaverse, the low demand from users to use it and a general confusion among them about how to use this technology, have left another macro project of a large company in a dry dock despite the powerful investments for this tool that have been dedicated in the last months.
