Zuck Pulls the Plug on the Metaverse
All 5 users are said to be "devastated"
The most over-hyped, completely nonsensical and unfeasible technology development in the past decade is finally being taken off of life support.
Yes, the Metaverse is dead.
Well, it was dead from the start, but now it’s official.
The company is shutting down Horizon Worlds on June 15th, the virtual reality social network for Quest VR headsets that was once the cornerstone of its Metaverse dreams. A technology on which Mark Zuckerberg once said “People will look back a decade from now and talk about the importance of the work being done here,” is now relegated to the history books and will go down as one of the most expensive flops ever.
And when I say expensive, I’m talking a reported $73 BILLION DOLLARS.
That’s a frankly outrageous sum of money burned to follow one man’s misguided obsession with a fad that was so obviously doomed from the second Facebook pivoted to Meta and demoed the “this will totally look like this in the future” launch video back in late 2021. It fell flat from day one and never recovered.
Everything we saw from that point was a clusterfuck of dumb ideas, legless avatars, empty worlds, creepy behaviour, and awful attempts from brands to get try and cash in. Even at its peak, there was clearly no staying power, and no sign that the concept was gaining momentum.
A look at the top platforms and their activity (and these are very generous figures) says it all:
Decentraland had highs of 8,000 user per day
The SandBox had highs of 350,000 monthly users
Horizon Worlds had somewhere between 200,000 and 300,000 monthly users
This wasn’t even failure to launch. It was a failure to build the rocket.
In truth, there wasn’t much choice but to call it quits. While Zuckerberg has a vice grip on his company and essentially can’t be fired, there was a surely a limit to how many times he could jump on an investor call and say “hey, so, we lost another $10 billion this quarter doing that dumb VR stuff nobody cares about.” The pivot-from-the-pivot to AI was another nail in the coffin, and the desperation to chase the latest shiny object meant resources had to be redirected (Meta cut 1000 staff from the Reality Labs unit in January, and more layoffs are coming) and money had to be reallocated so the AI department can now set it on fire.
The company is attempting to save some face by going “all in” on the Horizon World mobile app — I guess it’s just going to be some kind of knockoff Fortnite now, but with the guns replaced with work meetings? — but I think we can safely say no one gives a fuck about that one.
All that money, all that talent, all for nothing.
The maddest part? The stock price has nearly doubled since the Metaverse was announced. Make it make sense.
