Horizon Worlds by Meta Is Struggling to Convince With Only 300K Users. A Future Like Google+ to Come?
Even internally, Mark Zuckerberg struggles to convince with his metaverse.
The Meta metaverse that Mark Zuckerberg wants to impose at all costs, even if it means spending up to $70B in R&D in the years to come, is having more trouble than ever convincing users. The audience is more than meager with around 300,000 users at most, most of them in America.
To this, we must now add a new hard blow for Meta with an internal note from the boss of the company's metaverse that suggests that the project does not convince even internally.
This publication comes just a few days before the grand mass of the metaverse that the group is organizing on October 11, 2022. This memo dated September 15, 2022, consulted by the American media The Verge, is signed by Vishal Shah, vice president of metaverse activities of Meta.
Targeting Horizon Worlds, the main virtual world application of the group, this memo states that the project suffers from quality problems, and reveals that even the team responsible for its development does not use it.
Archaic graphics
“Feedback from testers and members of our team point to stability issues and bugs, which make it impossible to experience the magic of Horizon Worlds.” Observers had already fallen out of favor when the leader unveiled his avatar in April 2022, on the occasion of the software's release in France and Spain, and mocked its archaic graphics.
But the most striking thing about Vishal Shah's memo is the feeling of lack of interest from the development teams themselves. “Why don't we love the product we've created enough to use it all the time? The truth is, if we don't love it, how can we expect our users to love it?”
In another note, published a fortnight later, the head of the metaverse asks internal teams to use Horizon Worlds at least once ... a week. While the platform relies on a dozen thousand of universes - of more than variable quality - created by third-party developers, Vishal Shah points out the lack of hierarchy between all these experiences. A menu offers a Top 100 of the different worlds, but they are not classified by relevance.
Faced with these often “confusing and frustrating first steps,” the manager enjoins his teams to offer better content to new users. To gain more users, Meta plans a two-dimensional version of its metaverse, less immersive but more realistic, to attract users who don't have a virtual reality mask.
On this two-dimensional version, developers will have to “aim for quality” rather than the audience. “We are working on a product that has not found its place in the market. I need you to fully embrace the change,” insists Vishal Shah.
Is the specter of Google+ already looming over Horizon Worlds?
Given the strategic importance of Horizon Worlds in the pivot of Mark Zuckerberg's group towards virtual worlds, and the amount of money swallowed up by this project (already 13 billion dollars to date), these implorations of the boss of the Meta metaverse to convince his teams to use it, question.
Contacted, Meta answered through the voice of the spokeswoman of Reality Labs (the metaverse entity of the group) that the company remains “convinced that the metaverse is the future of computing.” Ashley Zandy also reiterated that the path to the metaverse is “a multi-year journey.”
From the beginning, Mark Zuckerberg has warned that the metaverse is in the making. The global advertising campaign that Meta has been running since September 5, 2022 - including on television - thus argues that “the metaverse is certainly virtual, but the impact will be real.” But it will be a long road to impose the metaverse on the general public.
In the meantime, the ex-Facebook metaverse should not join Google+, Google's social network, in the graveyard of failed diversifications.
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