Two years ago, the metaverse was billed as the next big thing - but many in the tech world have already moved on.
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But almost two years on, Zuckerberg has been forced to deny that he is now jettisoning the idea.
“A narrative has developed that we’re somehow moving away from focusing on the metaverse,” he told investors in April. “So I just want to say upfront that that’s not accurate.”
On Wednesday the company holds its annual VR event called Meta Connect.
It’s a chance, perhaps, for Zuckerberg to again explain his reasoning for taking an extremely profitable social media company and diverting its focus to an extremely unprofitable VR venture.
How unprofitable? Well, the most recent figures from Meta are eye-watering.
Reality Labs - which as the name suggests is Meta’s virtual and augmented reality branch - has lost a staggering $21 billion since last year.
Part of the losses reflect long-term investment. Meta wasn’t expecting short-term returns. But the worrying fact for the company is that, so far, there is very little evidence that this enormous punt will work.
Horizon Worlds, a game published by Meta, is about as close as the company has got to creating a metaverse.
Users can hop into different settings - cafes, comedy clubs, night clubs, basketball courts - to hang out and play games.
Meta claims it has 300,000 monthly users: tiny when compared to the billions of people on Facebook and Instagram.
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I don’t get why they don’t get it. Huge numbers of people simply can’t afford to invest $400 - $1000 on VR hardware. Those that can have not been adequately convinced of the value and a glorified chat room is never gonna cut it.
And then there are people like me who might have considered an Occulus before Facebook bought them, but I will never use another Facebook product as they are one of the easiest morally-bankrupt mega-corporations to boycott. None of the other vendors have a compelling product for me.
So even me, a tech leader who always hops on the cool new tech toys (I mean, I am posting on Lemmy right now after all) isn’t all that interested. Which means I’m not talking it up to people I know. Now ask my friends about my opinion of the Steam Deck and whether it influenced them to buy one. This is Business 101 stuff that the multi-billion dollar company can’t seem to figure out.
Don’t forget the significant number of people who are interested in the concept itself but not in Zuck’s implementation.
Zuck probably was relying on the sheer number of Instagram’s users. Little that he knows these people have very little overlap with his actual target audience for it.
AR/VR is a hard line for me that i won’t cross. doesn’t matter if its facebook or apple or whoever. i don’t want it, i don’t ask for it, i don’t see any benefit coming from it. i can accept it as a gaming gimmick, but aside of that, it’s a literal dystopia.