If Regina George from Mean Girls lived in Silicon Valley, I feel confident that she’d have a few words for Mark Zuckerberg. Perhaps something along the lines of: “Mark, stop trying to make Horizon Worlds happen. It’s not going to happen.”
Zuckerberg bet his company on the idea that everyone in the world would want to spend every waking hour on the metaverse — so much so that he changed the name from Facebook to Meta. But, according to a new report from the Wall Street Journal, very few people are actually interested in doing that.
The Meta CEO noted that he thinks the transition to the metaverse will take years, but he appeared to have high hopes for the first installment of the metaverse: His company’s virtual playground for creators, Horizon Worlds. This is the first flagship metaverse offering for consumers. It launched for everyone to use a year ago and has consistently fallen short of Zuckerberg’s goals.
Meta wanted 500,000 monthly active users on Horizon Worlds by the end of 2022 — about a year after it was fully available to the public. But, since there are currently fewer than 200,000 users, Meta had to change its goal post to a revised 280,000. That’s nearly a 50% failure on their part. Compare that to the 3.5 billion average monthly users that Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp garners.
And of those few users, not many of them are using the company’s virtual reality platform as Meta may have hoped. Just 9 percent of the “worlds” in Horizon Worlds have been visited by 50 people or more.
But, hey, at least the company had a super weird announcement earlier this week: legs on the avatars! Except the legs aren’t actually ready to roll out. Just one more idea without legs.
