The Metaverse was once regarded as the virtual future of the world. At the height of its popularity in the early 2020s, buyers boasted about how they had acquired virtual land next door to Hollywood legend. “Location, location” they exclaimed, like hot-footed regular world property buyers.

But not anymore.

The Metaverse has become “so yesterday” that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg plans to cut back up to 30 percent of its resources.

“Executives are considering potential budget cuts as high as 3o per cent for the metaverse group next year, which includes the virtual worlds product Meta Horizon Worlds and its Quest virtual reality unit, according to people familiar with the talks,” reports Bloomberg.

It says the cuts are expected to include layoffs in January 2026, and follows a series of meetings at Zuckerberg’s compound in Hawaii last month. Zuckerberg has also asked for 10 percent cuts across the board.

The Metaverse was seen as a modern era VR revival of the 2003 Virtual World platform Second Life, which at its peak had 21 million accounts. But it suffered 30 per cent layoffs in 2010. It now seems The Metaverse is drifting in the same direction with the public taking diminishing interest in Metaverse products.

Lockdowns during COVID are likely to have negatively impacted the Metaverse’s development with the public more concerned about savouring the real world when lockdowns ended.

Working from home became the rage with workers not interested in logging into a virtual office to chat with workmates in a virtualised coffee queue. Business found it easier to communicate using regular video streaming.

Investors became weary of Metaverse projects that garnered little interest. The online safety and privacy issues prevalent on the internet arose in the Metaverse too.

Many users never adopted Horizon Worlds, and while VR headsets were popular for gaming, there was lukewarm interest in experiencing the Metaverse through them. Reality Labs continued to report large quarterly losses.

Is the Metaverse dead? Not quite. It still has millions of users globally and gaming on it generates billions. Outside of that, interest has cooled dramatically.

While there’s also augmented reality applications in industry, and recent devices such as Ray-Ban Meta glasses, the early hype has well and truly gone. Projects whose foundations are hype can collapse over time as the hype evaporates.

That said, another manifestation could raise its head in 10 to 15 years – a Fourth Life which repeats the cycle over.