Mark Zuckerberg's foray into the metaverse has shown a growing number of warning signs in recent weeks.
Zuckerberg should stop, think, and ask himself one important question: When is enough, enough?
Meta's CEO said last year when he changed the company's name from Facebook that the metaverse would be "mainstream" in five to 10 years. But his company's future is being put to the test right here and now, while costly initiatives seem to be generating a resounding "meh" from the public.
Zuckerberg's vision has hit serious roadblocks in a relatively short amount of time, as several outlets including The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times recently reported — and economic uncertainty has already forced Zuckerberg to freeze hiring and take other moves that have shaken up employees. .
In all, Meta has spent $15 billion on Zuckerberg's passion project.
"Zuckerberg and team continue to take risks as they are betting on the future for now while still facing massive headwinds in their core business," Dan Ives, technology analyst at Wedbush Securities, told Insider. last week.
For the uninitiated, metaversion is a concept – or buzzword, depending on who you ask – that has caught on among tech and media companies over the past year – plus the next step in virtual connectivity.
Zuckerberg himself called it "the successor to the mobile Internet." On the other hand, Apple CEO Tim Cook isn't sure most people can even define what the hell a meta version is.
But Zuckerberg is fully on board with the idea, even changing the name of his company to reflect the big bet. He claims the technology already exists to get people into virtual worlds.
That includes Meta's Quest 2 headset, which costs $400 and can immerse users in Horizon Worlds virtual reality. But so far, the overall Meta version experience is lacking - both for the public and those in the community.
Meta paused the rollout of new features for Horizon last month, the WSJ reported, due to user complaints such as a lack of others to interact with and harassment.
Here are just a few damning data points in the WSJ story, based on internal documents it obtained:
Horizon has 200,000 monthly active users, which is less than the 280,000 Meta projected by the end of the year (and that was after the company lowered its projection from 500,000).
9% of the worlds built on the platform are visited by only 50 users. Most have no visitors at all.
Most users leave the platform within the first month, and more than half of headsets are abandoned within six months.
The barrier to entry is also rising. John Carmack, consulting CTO for Meta's virtual reality efforts, recently acknowledged that the Quest headset's $100 price hike was because free apps, from which Meta makes little money from in-app purchases, were more popular than its premium ones games.
So the metaverse experiment doesn't exactly get off to a promising start. Even buzzy announcements like Mark Zuckerberg's new virtual legs turned out to be marketing fluff showing what the company wanted to do rather than an actual feature.
It's so messy that even the team working on the Horizon metaverse app barely uses it, according to an internal report obtained by The Verge.
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