166804017 story It's been one year since Facebook changed its name to "Meta Platforms" remembers
The Street. So after Mark Zuckerberg "bought the Oculus Quest VR headset, rebranded it Meta Quest, and formed Reality Labs solely to work on all projects related to the metaverse" — what happened next?
Meta's shares and market value have dropped and Zuckerberg's personal fortune has shrunk, falling from $125 billion in January to $49.1 billion at last check, putting him No. 23 on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Reality Labs is facing the hard reality that it's pouring out gallons of red ink, losing $10 billion last year and about $5.7 billion so far in 2022.
And leaked internal documents reveal discussions between Reality Labs management and employees, indicating that "Horizon Worlds" [Meta's flagship metaverse for consumers] is ridden with game-breaking bugs, leading to a "quality lockdown" for the rest of the year.
In fact, Horizon Worlds is also "failing to meet internal performance expectations," reports CNBC, citing internal company documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal:
Meta initially aimed to reach 500,000 monthly active users in Horizon Worlds by the end of the year, but the current figure is less than 200,000, according to the report. Additionally, the documents showed that most users didn't return to Horizon after the first month on the platform, and the number of users has steadily declined since spring, the Journal said. According to the report, only 9% of worlds are visited by 50 or more people.
"An empty world is a sad world," one internal document reportedly adds. And
Fortune cited some more discouraging statistics from the
Journal's article:
- Meta wants users to create their own worlds using Horizon's tools. Less than 1% are doing so. - A tip feature to reward creators for their efforts has generated payouts of under $500 globally. Cumulatively, Horizon's worlds have brought in only about $10,000 in "In-World Payments". In the past three years, the retention rates for the virtual-reality headsets have gone down.
CNBC also notes that the report "comes as the company's stock falls, user numbers decline and advertisers cut spending. Meta shares are down 62% so far this year...." So how did Meta respond to the Journal's article?
A Meta spokesman told The Wall Street Journal that the company continues to make improvements to the metaverse, which was always meant to be a multiyear project. Representatives for Meta didn't immediately respond to CNBC's request for comment.
Meta has said it will release a web version of Horizon for mobile devices and computers this year, but the spokesman didn't have any launch dates to disclose.
