While Meta is now throwing billions at AI like all other companies in Silicon Valley, it has not yet abandoned its last great crusade, the idea that it would build an online metaverse, something it was so convinced of, they renamed the entire company.
Well, that hasn’t gone great.
In a new memo from Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth, shared internally (via Business Insider), Meta will still push the metaverse, including its main product, Horizon Worlds, in 2025, but it may be the last year it does so if it does not turn things around:
“We have the best portfolio of products we’ve ever had in market and are pushing our advantage by launching half a dozen more AI powered wearables. We need to drive sales, retention, and engagement across the board but especially in MR. And Horizon Worlds on mobile absolutely has to break out for our long term plans to have a chance.”
He goes on to say that Horizon Worlds could “go down as the work of visionaries or a legendary misadventure.” You may be able to guess which way things are leaning.
Meta has not shared much data about the state of Horizon Worlds for a while now, but back in 2022, usage had actually dropped from 500,000 users down to 200,000 below Meta’s own targets of at least 280,000. Later, further explorations led many to believe that the population had eventually shrunk much, much lower, but again, Meta has not shared player data in years. It has, however, shown that its metaverse division, Reality Labs, has lost tens of billions of dollars since its inception, which may be why Bosworth says that it hasn’t “actually made a dent in the world yet.”
I have been covering the metaverse and Horizon Worlds for a long time now, and when it premiered it was immediately memed with its legless avatars and poor graphics, including an infamous metaverse selfie shared by Mark Zuckerberg, as seen above. Meta has really tried to make significant improvements to its metaverse tech and Horizon Worlds since then, but it is genuinely difficult to believe this is ultimately going anywhere and this “make or break” 2025 will end in anything but “break.”
The thing is, the metaverse does exist, outside of VR, in a game like Fortnite, which has live virtual events and combines more IPs than Ready Player One ever did. You can have Chun Li killing Batman with a lightsaber and Ariana Grande attacks with Wolverine claws. You can also make the argument that games like GTA Online, Roblox and Minecraft have created their own metaverses, of sorts. The term is sort of pointless, however, as large virtual worlds have existed for ages, but this “fully immersive” idea of rendering all this in VR has not gone anywhere with poor products like Horizon Worlds and a lack of mass adoption and usage of VR tech compared to alternatives.
Meta’s vision for this is not long for this world, and all this cash will be funneled into AI soon enough. I wonder if they’ll change their name again.
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