Nearly a year has passed since Facebook changed its name to Meta. The CEO announced the rebranding to demonstrate that he was fully committed to the metaverse.
Metaverse is a virtual place where people might party and engage in a wide range of activities. But how have things been progressing up until now? It’s not looking good, according to WSJ reports.
Although Meta offers several other apps, Horizon Worlds is the primary one to access the “internet world.”
Originally, Meta set a target or a goal to reach 500,000 monthly users for Horizon Worlds by the end of 2022, but revised that figure to 280,000 in recent weeks, according to reports obtained by WSJ.
The current number of monthly users of the Horizon World is less than 200,000, which is very poor considering the number of active users on Meta’s social networks Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, which have a combined total of 3.5 billion average monthly users.
Then this leaves the question as to why the metaverse project is falling short. Why has it been below expectations?
According to Meta’s internal assessment;
- Most visitors to the horizon worlds generally don’t return to the app after the first month.
- The user base has steadily declined since the spring.
- The crazy part is that only 9% of the worlds built by creators are ever visited by at least 50 people. Most are never visited.
In a survey of horizon users, conducted by meta, it was gathered that users couldn’t find worlds they liked and couldn’t find other users to interact with. Some complaints were that “people do not look real” and that Avatars don’t have legs.
“An empty world is a sad world,” said one document summarizing the company’s efforts to herd users toward venues where they would encounter others.
Not withstanding, reports indicate the company’s metaverse efforts were intended to be multiyear projects and improvements are being made.
