Tinder swipes left on the metaverse as company reports $10M quarterly loss from the effort

Dating app Tinder has a message for the metaverse: it's not you, it's me. The company is reducing its commitment to moving into the much-touted virtual reality realm as it reels from an operating loss of $10 million in the most recent financial quarter. In February, 2021 Match Group bought South Korean company Hyperconnect for over $1.7 billion. At the time, top executives hyped the purchase as one that would see Match Group's various dating apps slide into DMs of the future metaverse thanks to Hyperconnect's live video and chat technologies. The metaverse, which has been highly pushed by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other Silicon Valley moguls, can include virtual reality and also augmented reality that would combine aspects of the physical and digital worlds.