Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse Vision Is Already Failing?
Mark Zuckerberg's Metaverse is not gaining popularity the way he hoped and has very few active users.
This article is more than 2 years old
When Mark Zuckerberg announced that his social network would change its name to Meta and become a metaverse company, he had a vision of a utopian future in which billions of people would inhabit immersive digital environments for hours on end. Inside this virtual, augmented world, they would work, socialize and play games. But a year later, its flagship virtual-reality game, Horizon Worlds remains buggy and unpopular.
Internal documents about the metaverse, including memos from employees, show that Horizon Worlds isn’t attracting the number of visitors the company had hoped for. And the visitors who do show up generally don’t go back to the virtual land after the first month, The Wall Street Journal reports. Additionally, most user-created worlds have gone completely unvisited, while Second Life and VRChat have more concurrent users, according to folks at Meta.
As such, Meta’s Vice President of Metaverse, Vishal Shah, said the team would remain in a quality lockdown for the rest of the year. This time will be spent ensuring that Horizon World’s quality gaps and performance issues are fixed before the virtual realm is available to more users. Interestingly, a survey by Meta researchers found users mostly complained about being unable to find worlds they liked and rarely found others to interact with.
Other grievances included in-game people not looking “real” enough. Some even had issues with the lack of Horizon World avatar legs. It’s worth noting that metaverse researchers only spoke to 514 users because of how few folks are playing.
Although Meta has said it’s working on more lifelike avatars, the current quality of its graphics pales in comparison to non-VR platforms like Fortnite. However, at the Meta Connect conference, Zuckerberg said the company plans to add the highly requested legs feature very soon, CNET reports.
For now, Meta is focused on getting its employees to use Horizon Worlds after Shah said staffers still weren’t visiting the metaverse platform enough. In a memo via The Verge, he said a plan was being made to hold managers accountable for having their teams use it at least once a week.
“Everyone in this organization should make it their mission to fall in love with Horizon Worlds,” he said. “You can’t do that without using it. Organize times to do it with your colleagues or friends, in both internal builds and the public build so you can interact with our community.”
The metaverse Vice President went on to call out specific issues with Horizon Worlds, saying that the onboarding experience is confusing and frustrating for users. And that the team needed to introduce new users to top-notch worlds that will ensure their first visit is a success. Shah explained that the teams working on Horizon Worlds needed to collaborate better and expect more changes to come.
Despite a dismal start, Meta spokesperson Ashley Zandy said the company is confident that the metaverse is the future of computing and that it should be built around people. She added that Meta is always making quality improvements and acting on the feedback from its community of creators. “This is a multiyear journey, and we’re going to keep making what we build better,” she said.
