Meta(re)versed
The Metaverse was going to be the so-called future of the internet. The next frontier. The next iteration of social connection (albeit done alone).
We would ditch the real world in favor of dawning a headset to enter a better digital environment where we could live, work and play (albeit minus our lower halves). Though the concept had been around for years, it was thrust into the public eye when Facebook rebranded to Meta, signaling it was now a Metaverse-first, not a Facebook-first company. Mark Zuckerberg was all in and was ready to throw (read: set fire to) billions of dollars to establish his company as the frontrunner.
Meta’s bullishness — now more like foolishness — opened the floodgates, and hype quickly followed. With it, an endless line of greedy brands and corporations who started to wax lyrical about the potential of this virtual future (and drooled over the prospect of the new channels to barrage us with ads and products, in this case, directly into our eyeballs). Wendy created the Wendyverse. There was the Miller bar. There were concerts and fashion shows. The first Metaverse bank. Other companies tried to capitalize on the items and building blocks that would form the Metaverse, like NFTs. Coca-Cola, Nike and Liquid Death all released NFTs for no reason other than “hey, everyone else is doing it.”
The feeding frenzy was nauseating. And, because everyone was making shit for the sake of making shit, the outcomes were as expected: shit.
It was all just soulless, lifeless cash grabs, nothing more than brands and companies suffering a bad dose of FOMO and wanting to show investors (who were still interested at this point) that they were ‘down with the kids.’ Nobody cared about what the Metaverse was or could become. Hell, nobody could even define what they thought it was. The result was a Multiverse of Metaverses, full of various concepts, systems, meanings and protocols that would inevitably work against each other if any actually came to fruition. Without this fundamental collective understanding and direction, Meta and other creators were asking people to remain excited about an unknown entity. And it didn’t take long for interest to start waning, especially when the promised outcomes were still years and years away.
Still, brands couldn’t help but use the phrase again and again and again. Everything and anything that could be tied to the Metaverse was. Eventually, the Metaverse joined Web3 and Blockchain on the ‘Buzzword Bingo’ card, becoming another word uttered so much and applied to so many things that it became utterly meaningless. And eventually, the general public gave up trying to understand the what, who and why of the Metaverse, and stopped caring. Search traffic for the word has collapsed by about 80 percent over the past year or so. By the time generative A.I. showed up, the Metaverse was already at an inflection point despite barely getting off the ground. For proof, one only needs to look at Decentraland and The Sandbox, the most popular Metaverse worlds. They had 38 and 522 daily active users, respectively.
With interest waning and the latest grift shift to A.I. well underway — resulting in a massive swing in venture capital allocation — brands and businesses have begun quietly retreating from the Metaverse. Like Homer Simpson slinking back into the hedge, one by one, they’ve closed divisions, reallocated resources, and brushed the remnants of a failed cash grab under the rug. Some of the more notable reversals include:
Despite spending 21 BILLION DOLLARS, Meta failed to shift public perception and get people excited about the prospect of spending their work and social lives trapped in a digital environment void of practicality, purpose and fun. I wonder why. During an earnings call a few months back, Zuckerberg admitted the company was switching focus, with, yup, you guessed it, A.I. now the main project.
Only four months after Meta’s rebrand, Disney followed on. Former CEO Bob Chapek called it “the next great storytelling frontier.” Unfortunately, returning CEO Bob Iger disagreed; the division tasked with exploring how the company could enter the Metaverse was eliminated in late March. Disney’s latest focus? A.I.
At the beginning of the year, Microsoft culled several divisions, including the team behind its Mixed Reality Tool Kit, while social VR platform AltspaceVR was shut down. It all but signaled the end of a very brief stint in all things Metaverse.
Roblox, seen as one of the brands that helped establish the Metaverse, is now trying to distance itself from the terminology. Speaking to The Drum, Tian Pei, Roblox’s head of sport, said, “We’re not talking about the Metaverse.”
There will undoubtedly be many more trying to pretend they never got sucked up in the Metaverse madness. Though we’ve moved on to the next shiny object, we can’t rule out a future full of headset zombies. Not yet, anyway. Many are still plowing on, either out of sheer wishful thinking or perhaps because they’ve no choice but to - sunk cost fallacy and all that. Meta is still working on Quest headsets — though the current focus is back on gaming and trying to get people to use the damn things — and still committed to spending on the Metaverse. Apple is still launching a headset, though it is doing so with very low expectations. Only 130,000 to 150,000 units are being made for the first year, and plans for a more affordable model have been pushed back. Still, the headset's release — it should be noted the headset is AR, not VR — is likely to bring a little renaissance to the Metaverse buzz. And you bet the vultures will be circling, ready to dive back in and feed on the hype carcass.
But for now, as the Metaverse continues to become nothing than a fleeting moment in tech history, it has been an embarrassing — and likely expensive — foray for brands and businesses scrambling to get into a completely undercooked concept that is so many years from being ready, if it ever will be. It’s time for everyone to take the headset off and face reality — we’re all just fine being IRL.