The Costly Failures of Facebook’s Metaverse
Credit: Digital Trends
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg thinks he foresees the future of daily life. In a podcast with Joe Rogan, he envisions a world in which everyday objects are replaced by digital replications. Your television could be nothing more than a projection produced by a pair of glasses. The workplace would also be transformed; work could now be conducted in virtual worlds, with people appearing as avatars in conference rooms. The goal would be to create a more “natural” connection between one’s physical and digital lives, and engaging with other people in far-flung places would be even more seamless.
Convinced of the vision that would be dubbed the “metaverse,” Zuckerberg moved to shape his entire company around this new method of living. Facebook had built its vast fortunes on the success of its social media services but wanted to shift its focus to new frontiers of human engagement. It was renamed “Meta Platforms” in 2021 and significant resources would be redirected to virtual and “mixed reality” ventures. This decision would cause a reckoning large enough to wipe $800 billion from the company’s market value in just over a year.
The flagship product of Meta’s new initiative is Horizon Worlds, described as a “social universe.” It allows users to explore virtual worlds, but much to the company’s dismay, nobody is exploring them. The most popular worlds, Decentraland and The Sandbox, have 38 and 522 daily active users respectively. These are paltry statistics considering the initiative cost upwards of $10 billion to produce. For comparison, The Last of Us Part II, a game so technically advanced that competitor Microsoft acknowledged it “set a new bar,” cost an estimated $100 million.
The perception of Horizon as a substandard VR game is common despite Zuckerberg’s insistence that it is something more. Phil Spencer, the head of Xbox, put it best when he called the metaverse a “poorly built video game” at the WSJ Tech Live conference. The graphics have less fidelity than many games from the early 2000s and the avatars’ lack of legs has attracted universal mockery. Meta has stumbled constantly in its response to these criticisms; an underwhelming showcase of marginally better visuals in October attracted further ridicule when it was revealed the new “legs” were merely a product of motion capture.
Meta’s employees aren’t any more convinced of Zuckerberg’s vision than the public. Already exasperated by what has been described as a lack of a coherent plan beyond their boss’s whims, most choose not to use it at all. Many don’t own a VR headset (Meta’s own Quest Pro costs an eye-watering $1,500) and others don’t think it offers an enticing alternative to working in a physical room. It is broadly seen as a distraction within the company, but Zuckerberg’s control means little will change without his approval.
Despite Meta’s obvious failure to convince people that the metaverse is the future, other companies continue to treat it as a groundbreaking innovation. In partnership with game platform Roblox, Walmart created several virtual worlds that act as little more than poorly-disguised advertisements to lure children into the world of consumerism early, complete with virtual merchandise called “verch.”
Other companies are contributing to the confusion of what the metaverse is, and the media frequently uses it as a clickbait term for anything Internet-related. Time Magazine’s “Into the Metaverse” newsletter curates articles on any topic relating to “the future of the Internet.” Dating apps Tinder and Bumble added virtual currency undergirded by borderline-nonsensical marketing lingo relating to blockchain in an attempt to convince more savvy users that they are investing in something special.
This all culminates to create the fantasy that the metaverse is the future of human interaction when it is little more than a meaningless term perpetuated by corporations desperately searching for a novel marketing angle. While the public may justifiably laugh at the absurdity of the endeavor, it poses an existential threat to Meta as a company.
While it was busy attempting to “reinvent the workplace” in the past year, the company’s stock price halved and the once-trillion-dollar behemoth is now worth less than $300 billion. With 11,000 jobs cut and billions of dollars wasted, Zuckerberg faces a choice: will he admit that Facebook’s pivot was a failure or will he drive the company further into the virtual abyss? Whether he can admit his mistakes will likely determine Meta’s fate and whether we can finally put the “metaverse” delusion behind us.