Meta reportedly cancels all its Metaverse plans

Update: Meta Reality Labs UK has since reached out to us, to share the following statement about its Metaverse future.

"This is untrue - Meta has not stopped its plans towards the Metaverse vision."

Original: Just a few months ago, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg was still so convinced that The Metaverse would be the next step for the internet that the idea alone justified the countless billions of dollars the company had already spent on it and promised to spend even more in the future.

But since then, the tune has sounded significantly different, it seems. In a large and comprehensive article at The Information, Meta has dropped the term "Metaverse" altogether when presenting collaborations to potential partners. Among other things, it states:

"Meta is no longer pitching the metaverse in conversations with its advertisers and is instead trying to get them to back its Tiktok-a-like short-form videos and its AI tools. That's in stark contrast to last year, where every second word out of Zuckerberg's mouth was 'metaverse,' in what he was expecting to be the future of the internet."

This is in pretty stark contrast to the roughly $4.3 billion spent on Reality Labs in the last quarter alone, and Metaverse was also the whole reason they changed their name to Meta.

Did you think Metaverse would be the next big thing on the web?