Chinese Tech Giant Tencent Announces 'Personnel Reshuffle' at Metaverse Unit, Dismisses Layoff Rumors – What's Going On?

cryptonews.com:

The dawn of 2023 has seen crypto assets break free of suppresive year-long price action. But with many in tech betting big on the Metaverse at the start of 2022, things are getting ugly.

In an exclusive report from Chinese news outlet 36 Krypton. It has been revealed that the world's largest video games company Tencent will be partially disbanding its XR (extended reality) department.

On February 16, Tencent's General Manager sent out redundancy notices via the HR department. The email offered XR team members a redundancy buffer period to seek other internal or external opportunities.

With more than 300 employees across 9 offices forming the XR department, this could be the biggest metaverse layoff to date.

Closures could also impact the visual labs team (80 staff), the spatial audio technology centre, and the business decision making committee.

Far from unexpected. This comes following January's news that Tencent had suspended XR department operations. And in the aftermath of Uncle Li (the 'soul of Tencent') leaving the company back in November - in what became a huge knock to investor confidence.

The short-lived adventure into metaverse tech saw Tencent chasing opportunities in the Chinese domestic market.

An initial multi-billion bid to acquire augmented reality (AR) headset manufacturer PICO was thwarted by a better bid from rival Byte.

Subsequent acquisitions of domestic AR technology manufactures Yingchuang and Blackshark also ended in failure.

Sources close to 36 Krypton allege that despite all the capital investment. There was almost no employees in the XR department with experience in AR hardware development.

Ultimately, these AR flops and acquisition failures have left Tencent out positioned in the Chinese domestic