There's not much to be heard about the Metaverse, which is justifiable since it's still being developed. The little news that does go public is a bit negative, but that's not stopping meta from working on its VR project.
Meta Facing Obstacles
The company still has high hopes for the metaverse project, even if it has seen rough results. It didn't help that Meta laid off around 11,000 employees, and the stock price dipped by 65%. According to reports, Horizon Worlds has cost Meta $10 billion already.
Even with a huge amount of spending, the company's project has not reached the success it had hoped. It will take Meta some time to make up for the fact that the Chief Technology Officer of Meta's Oculus, John Carmack, has left the company.
So far, the biggest change Meta announced aside from the reanimation of avatar appearances is the addition of legs. Before, avatars were just a bunch of floating characters only visible from the waist up, and according to Gizmodo, it barely even works.
Other reports also mentioned that Meta is not faring well. It appears that fewer people are spending time in Horizon Worlds as time passes. It's far from what the company expected, which was 500,000 monthly users. They have lowered their expectations to 200,000.
As mentioned in Kotaku, most players decide to leave Horizon Worlds after a month. Around only nine percent of worlds created by users were visited by around 50 players. The Quest 2 headset has seen success in sales, but not so much with what it was sold for.
Meta Remains Optimistic
Despite all the negative press surrounding the VR project, Meta is still moving forward with it. They mentioned that 2022 was harder than expected, though they never thought it would be easy or straightforward.
Meta's blog mentioned that along with the economic challenges that the world is facing, Meta's core business is experiencing issues as well. This has caused skepticism about the investments that Meta was pouring into Horizon Worlds.
The metaverse project is just one aspect of the company. They are seeing great results on other platforms. In their third-quarter results, Facebook had an all-time high with daily active users. Instagram had two billion users a month, and WhatsApp had two billion active users daily.
The three mentioned platforms are the core business of Meta, which receives 80% of overall investments. The remaining 20% will be allotted to Reality Labs, which is responsible for developing Horizon Worlds.
Long-term vision also became a topic in the blog, mainly to make a point about not giving up on a project so easily. Andrew Bosworth, Meta's Chief Technology Officer, said short-term thinking could lead to disastrous results.
Bosworth mentioned examples like companies that shy away from innovation, wherein they would just focus on the existing business until it stops working. He also implied that short-term thinking was not tolerated where he grew up, which is one of the reasons why new technologies exist.
It's still not clear how Horizon Worlds will turn out in the future. After all, Meta is not yet done with it. Who knows, maybe it will eventually turn the movie "Ready Player One" into reality, where users would spend their time escaping the world.
