Meta is getting serious this time.

According to insiders, Zuckerberg’s Metaverse division, Reality Labs, may face a budget cut of nearly 30% next year. For context, other company teams are only being asked to cut 10%, so this level of reduction says a lot.

What’s even worse is the fate of those Metaverse concept tokens—they’ve seen their total market cap drop by over 99% this year alone. That number hurts just to look at.

Remember back in 2021 when Facebook rebranded as Meta? The Metaverse concept was all the rage, with both the tech and crypto worlds betting big on it. Horizon Worlds, Quest headsets, all kinds of virtual world projects were springing up everywhere.

So what was the result? After burning $70 billion over three years, what did they get? A virtual platform with barely any users and a bunch of virtual avatars with poorly modeled legs.

Once the AI wave hit, everything changed. Company leadership finally realized that the market enthusiasm for VR and virtual worlds was nowhere near what they had expected. No matter how much money you burn, if users aren’t interested, it’s all for nothing.

If these cuts really go through, there will probably be another round of layoffs early next year. The engineers who joined for the Metaverse dream are probably feeling pretty conflicted right now.

This whole thing is a wake-up call for the entire industry: no matter how flashy the concept, it ultimately has to withstand the test of the market. The era of burning money to chase dreams might really be coming to an end.