Meta’s Facebook (is?) is one of the most popular social media platforms in the world, with billions of users. However, its failed hyper-reality project, Horizon Worlds, which doesn’t work nearly as well. In fact, a new report shows that almost no one spends much time on Horizon Worlds at all, with most user-generated worlds going completely out of whack. Meanwhile, Second life and VRChat there are more concurrent users, according to the people at Meta.
According to a new report from The Wall Street JournalInternal documents and staff at Meta paint a picture where no one is actually playing Horizon Worlds, a free-to-play virtual reality hyper-reality that allows users to create and tour “the world” with friends or strangers. Think Roblox, but more cold and heartless. Initially, the company hoped to have 500,000 monthly active users visit these different virtual worlds. Now that number has been revised to around 200,000.
Internal stats show that most players don’t stick around after their first month in Horizon Worlds and Meta have seen a steady decline in active users since spring. WSJ reports that of all the user-generated worlds in the game, only about nine percent are accessed by more than 50 players. The majority of the remaining ones are never accessed by anyone other than the original creator. The end result is a lot of bare, barren digital land. Even Quest’s—-a world created by Meta as part of a larger Super Bowl marketing campaign—-It was a huge failure, with very few users accessing it.
“An empty world is a sad world”, a document viewed by WSJ.
And while Quest 2 Headphones sold well, a lot of customers don’t come back to play anything. According to the report, more than half of Quest headsets stopped being used by players after just six months.
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As for why people aren’t flocking to the expensive metaverse Facebook has created, a survey conducted by Meta researchers found that users mostly complain about not being able to find the world they like. and rarely find other people to interact with. Other complaints include the people in the game don’t look “real” enough. Some even have problems with the lack of Horizon world avatar legs. I guess that explains all the fanfare around the legs added to the game earlier this month, even with the announcement is a lie.
The WSJ noted that researchers at Meta spoke to only 514 people because there were so few players, calling the current active player base “small and precious”. It’s no surprise to hear that, according to people familiar with Horizon Worldsapps with fewer concurrent users VRChat and 2003 Second life.
The rest of the report isn’t much better, and is further proof that the hyper-reversed future of VR that so many companies and technologists are trying to market is likely not going to stick with everyone. Hell, the people who work at Meta don’t want to use Horizon Worlds. And Meta seems to know how unpopular, all this nonsense is with your normal consumer, because now it starts to rotate Its new VR headset for large companies can be tricked to make their employees wear VR headset for eight hours a day at work. But at least everyone will always have Walmart Metaverse to hang out in the middle of a break, right?
