The Wall Street Journal claimed that Meta is having difficulty selling its metaverse concept, citing issues such as errors, disinterested customers, and a lack of understanding on what it will take to succeed.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg has warned that patience will be required, claiming that the shift may take years. However, Horizon Worlds, the company’s primary metaverse offering, is falling short of internal performance expectations. Meta had a goal of 500,000 monthly active users, but that was subsequently reduced to 280,000 — and the current figure is fewer than 200,000.
According to papers obtained by the WSJ, many Horizon customers do not return to the programme after the first month, and the user base has progressively fallen since the spring.
And Meta’s social life Media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp each have over 3.5 billion active users each month, accounting for about half of the world’s population. Meanwhile, Horizon reaches less people than the population of Sioux Falls, SD, according to the WSJ.
Horizon’s services include a variety of interactive virtual locations or worlds where users can shop, party, and work.
However, internal figures show that only 9% of the worlds created by creators have more than 50 visitors – and many are never viewed at all.
According to PYMNTS, Zuckerberg’s ambitions of being “metaverse first, not Facebook first” have received some criticism in the year since he changed the company name. This included a virtual reality image of himself with what appeared to be critics referred to as “soulless eyes” and graphics from the 1990s.
On Oct. 7, a leaked memo from the firm revealed that the Horizon Worlds Metaverse Lite had a number of glitches and stability difficulties, causing even workers to avoid using it.
Zuckerberg’s Unlovable Metaverse Shares Meta’s Payments Policy Flaws.
Nothing, however, was as harsh as Friday’s (Oct. 7) news that, in a September memo leaked to the Financial Times, Vishal Shah, Meta’s metaverse vice president, admitted that its Horizon Worlds’ Metaverse Lite was so riddled with bugs and stability issues that even the company’s own employees didn’t want to use it, let alone the developers it needs to attract to build out actual content.
Poor graphics, legless avatars, and a company, as one unidentified Meta metaverse employee told the FT, aren’t the only issues.
A metaverse is a location where people go to be amused in a more proactive, interactive fashion with content created by others with the intention of profiting from it. It makes little difference if this comes in the form of sales, fees, or eyeballs.
Many people will create metaverse content for the sake of creating it — or to share with their friends. Likewise, many creators and influencers make a business on Facebook and Instagram, bringing viewers for those advertising with them.
If You Construct It…
However, in a Meta metaverse, people want to play interesting games, attend concerts, examine artwork, and purchase virtual goods (and eventually real-world) products and services To be fair, consider advertisements. So goes the sales spiel.
Zuckerberg stated in his April payments pitch that what would sell in a metaverse would “end up being a little bit different from what you’d expect from the physical world.” As a result, it necessitates a great deal of experimentation and ingenuity on the part of those who create the worlds and experiences.”
That means they require far more infrastructure support than those who share photographs. And Meta has yet to demonstrate that it can compete with blockchain-based start-ups like Decentraland and The Sandbox, let alone long-established virtual worlds like Roblox and Second Life.
Meta Metaverse Weekly: Emperor Has No Legs in Horizon Worlds
Wait until you see what the Twitterverse has been saying about Mark Zuckerberg’s “selfie” used to herald Horizon Worlds’ debut in France and Spain.
The image of CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s avatar standing in front of the Eiffel Tower and Barcelona’s Sagrada Familia cathedral was described as “soulless” by gaming site Kokatu and “dead-eyed” by Forbes.
German word that’s like schadenfreude, but specifically for how wonderful it is to see the company that helped break democracy pouring money into the company that helped break democracy.”
$10 billion squandered.”
“Break democracy” refers to allegations that Facebook data was used to sway the 2020 presidential elections; the phrase was coined by Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) to criticise Zuckerberg and Facebook immediately after the introduction of the failed Libra/Diem stablecoin project in 2019.
Horizon Worlds, which began as a portal for the company’s bestselling Quest line of VR goggles, has expanded into Europe, adding Spain and France, and increasing customization options — which apparently means the ability to “block, mute, or report anyone engaging in
unwanted behaviour” via a pop-up Safe Zone that all new users must learn about during the onboarding process.
The metaverse may be in beta, but claims of in-world corruption persist. Harassment is a well-known issue.
It’s important to remember that Horizon Worlds isn’t the $15 billion metaverse platform that the firm has spent the last year and a half developing. It’s a sort of halfway house where folks can get a taste of the metaverse as an immersive, interactive world.
Nonetheless, as some commenters pointed out, the avatars’ absence of legs appears outmoded.
Decentraland and The Sandbox, the main blockchain-based metaverse projects, are slightly better, as are the (completely legged and more realistic) bodies in Second Life and Fortnite — but not particularly so in Roblox.
Second Life, citing the Forbes story, used the opportunity to launch a Twitter thread asking players to pose for photos in front of the Eiffel Tower. Twitter:
All of the mockery does make a crucial point: the generic metaverse is still a long way off, and other efforts are still in their infancy. And, honestly, most people who aren’t active in a metaverse are probably hearing about it because Meta is working on it – Zuckerberg’s choice to rename Facebook Meta and declare metaverses the future of social media popularised the concept.
So it’s probably not ideal for the most visible metaverse to be the weakest in terms of visually immersive quality.
Taking Advantage of Savings
Snapple was an early adopter of the metaverse’s much-touted capacity to transport people. With its Blockchain Bodega marketing approach, it connects in-game brand marketing to real-world items.
In Decentraland, the company erected a New York City-style corner store and added a scavenger hunt in which players can collect $1.39 rebate tickets redeemable in real life — albeit, as CoinDesk pointed out, only if you have a PayPal wallet. There is currently no crypto payment option.
However, real-world Snapple Elements drink purchasers will receive a bottlecap code redeemable for a metaverse-wearable nonfungible token (NFT) apparel piece.
