Chinese IT giants Tencent and Bytedance to scale operations in metaverse

SNEAK PEEK

  • Tencent and Bytedance will implement personnel reductions in their respective metaverse branches.
  • The metaverse development teams at Tencent and Bytendence are planning hundreds of layoffs.
  • The company’s founder and CEO, Henry Zhou, forecasts they will sell over 1 million headsets.

Tencent and Bytedance will implement personnel reductions in their respective metaverse branches—Tencent’s extended reality branch and Bytedance in Pico. You can find the headset’s affiliation in the metaverse.

Two of the largest Chinese internet corporations, Tencent and Bytedance, want to implement hundreds of layoffs in their metaverse development teams. Tencent has withdrawn strategies to join the metaverse hardware need. BT advised about 300 employees to look for other employment. The extended reality section, which is committed to creating virtual goods, would be dissolved.

Tencent’s specialized metaverse ring controller project was shelved due to its high cost and poor profitability projections. As per the sources,

It no longer fits entirely in with the updated approach the corporation had adopted as a whole.

There will be layoffs at Bytedance’s Pico, the hardware division for metaverse headsets, with some organizations expecting to lose 30% of their workforce. The company has just unveiled its Pico series and holds 15% of the market for VR headsets. Henry Zhou, the company’s founder and CEO, predicted they would sell more than 1 million headsets.

These allegations came amid a global drive for large corporations to reduce their efforts in developing metaverse-based software and hardware, thereby reducing field expenditures. Meta and Microsoft are western IT companies that have also made similar moves.

As part of its 10,000-employee layoff wave, Microsoft is forming metaverse-focused teams. After cutting 13% of its employees last year, Meta, which forecasts a metaverse by 2023, is contemplating another wave of layoffs.