With just a day to go until Meta announces its next VR headset, it sounds like some of the company’s employees aren’t too enthusiastic about the whole “metaverse” thing.
In a wide-ranging New York Times report about Meta’s direction in the leadup to its 2022 Meta Connect event, there were some juicy, little nuggets regarding how Meta employees feel about the company’s push towards a mixed-reality future. One source, for instance, said the company’s significant metaverse expenditures made them “sick to [their] stomach.” Meta lost $10 billion on VR investments in 2021.
The hits don’t stop there.
Only 58 percent of the respondents to a Meta employee survey conducted by Blind, an anonymous professional forum, said they understood CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse ambitions. One anecdote in the Times report said employees were pushed to use the in-house Horizon Worlds VR app for team meetings earlier this year. It turned out that a bunch of employees either didn’t have VR headsets yet or hadn’t gotten them up and running.
The company’s chief metaverse exec Vishal Shah even wrote an internal company post noting that not enough employees use Horizon Worlds and that the app would undergo extensive quality control changes through the rest of 2022, per The Verge. Perhaps most damningly, some employees reportedly refer to Meta’s VR-chasing as “M.M.H.,” or “make Mark happy,” referring to the CEO’s personal metaverse ambitions that are apparently driving the company’s efforts in that department.
Despite any negative coverage around Meta’s VR shift, it’d be unwise to think the direction will change anytime soon. Meta is set to debut its next headset, tentatively dubbed Quest Pro, on Tuesday. And regardless of the popular backlash to the visual style of Horizon Worlds (and Zuckerberg’s defense against the backlash), there are no reasons to believe Meta will stop investing time and money into developing the app.
Maybe all of these investments will work out in the end for Meta. Or maybe stories about employee dissatisfaction in the face of tumbling stock prices will continue to drop.
