Australian collaborationware company Atlassian has announced it will shed ten percent of staff – around 1,600 people. “It would be disingenuous to pretend AI doesn’t change the mix of skills we need or the number of roles required in certain areas. It does,” wrote CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes. “This is primarily about adaptation. We are reshaping our skill mix and changing how we work to build for the future.”
Meta is laying off about 10 percent of its Reality Labs metaverse division, and the cuts include closing down some of its VR gaming studios. In a statement about the broader Reality Labs layoffs, Clayton said that “We said last month that we were shifting some of our investment from Metaverse toward Wearables. This is part of that effort, and we plan to reinvest the savings to support the growth of wearables this year.”
The thousands of recently terminated Microsoft employees, navigating one of the company's largest layoffs in years amid a period of industry upheaval, already have a tool to cope with the emotional burden, according to one Xbox exec: Microsoft Copilot.
Meta laid off employees on Thursday in its Reality Labs division, which encompasses various virtual and augmented reality projects. The cuts impact employees within Oculus Studios, which develops apps and games for Meta’s Quest headsets. Reality Labs has been a massive cost for Meta, losing almost $5 billion in the last quarter of 2024 while generating about $1 billion in sales. Meta has reported billions of dollars in operating losses on Reality Labs each year since rebranding from Facebook and emphasizing its commitment to the “metaverse.”
Parent company ByteDance is ‘restructuring’ its gaming subsidiary following a recent review, with employees being given until December to keep working on unreleased titles. ByteDance is reportedly looking to rid itself of the gaming titles it’s already launched under Nuverse, such as Marvel Snap and Crystal of Atlan, and informed employees on Monday that they must stop working on unreleased games by December.
Unity Software announced plans to cut about 600 jobs, or 8% of its workforce, according to a company filing Tuesday with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The video game software developer said it will restructure “specific teams” and that the layoffs will help the company position itself for “long-term and profitable growth.” A company spokesperson declined to provide further details.
Let’s be real, none of these companies are teetering on the edge of bankruptcy — in fact, they were recently minting money.
The answer is that investors have changed how they’re evaluating companies, says Michael Cusumano, the deputy dean at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Generally, when companies are growing really fast — like when revenue is shooting up 20 percent or 30 percent a year — nobody cares about profits, Cusumano says. But we’re not in a growth period right now, so investors are being more cautious.
But we’re not in a growth period right now, so investors are being more cautious.
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