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.

I've just come out of a long-term lockdown. Instead, they crave the friendships and social groups they have been starved of over the past year. That's the verdict of dating apps such as Tinder and Bumble, which are launching or acquiring new services focused entirely on making and maintaining friends. "There's a really interesting trend that has been taking place in the connection space, which is this desire to have platonic relationships," said Bumble founder and CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd. "People are seeking friendship in ways they would have only done offline before the pandemic."

Online-dating company Match Group Inc. has reached an agreement to acquire South Korean social-media company Hyperconnect for $1.73 billion, broadening its services beyond connecting people in their love lives. The cash-and-stock deal, announced Tuesday, marks Match Group's largest acquisition to date. Hyperconnect, based in Seoul, has developed two video apps that focus on helping people interact one-on-one and with new communities. Hyperconnect's first app, Azar, offers live video and audio chat and can instantly translate voice and text for users that speak different languages. Hyperconnect's other app, Hakuna Live, is a social live-streaming app that provides group video and audio broadcasts.