Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg has made some questionable business decisions in the past, including the Cambridge Analytica fiasco, which saw millions of personal records collected by the British firm without the owner’s permission.
The news that Facebook’s parent company Meta will burn through $39bn in 2023 has shareholders concerned, not least because most of the money is going into Horizon Worlds, a nebulous metaverse concept that nobody seems to want.
Why is Mark Zuckerberg so determined to force the issue, then?
Diminishing Returns
Immersion in virtual experiences has always been a big seller. One of the earliest virtual reality units was a headache-inducing Nintendo device made in 1995, the Virtual Boy. While that experiment was quickly shelved and forgotten about, video games continued to hunt for a way to bridge the gap between what’s real and what isn’t. That quest has been so successful that graphical leaps (for instance) just don’t happen anymore. We’re now safely in the realm of diminishing returns, a plateau of polygons.
Not all industries have chased immersion at the same rate. A branch of entertainment related to video gaming, online casinos, has only recently adopted what it calls live gaming. The licensed New Jersey casino, Playster, has several experiences, including blackjack, craps, and roulette. What’s the difference? Live casino games feature a real, human dealer on webcam, who calls the shots similarly to how they would in a brick-and-mortar outlet.
This kind of product exists because it has value for customers. Mark Zuckerberg’s Horizon Worlds is a solution looking for a problem, especially as it’s the latest iteration of something that has struggled to find an audience. It was built from the ground up to be a more immersive version of PlayStation Home, Second Life, and several other virtual worlds – and it achieves that adequately. Yet, even in a world where remote work is growing in popularity, the need for virtual spaces isn’t.
Shared Spaces
Meta “hopes” that Horizon Worlds will reach around a billion people within the next decade, yet CNBC reports that it’s already falling short of its goals, posting user numbers of around half (200,000) of what it had expected to achieve (500,000) in 2022. Rival metaverse decentralized is failing, too, with rumors that it only had 38 players surfacing in October. This is despite a development cost of $1.2bn. Even with just these two examples, there’s a pattern surfacing, namely, that metaverses are expensive things to make but remain seemingly unwanted.
The future success of Meta is now inextricably tied to Horizon Worlds. Worryingly, for investors, at least, the only reason that Horizon Worlds even still exists is that Zuckerberg retains majority control over Meta.
This means that he can quite happily run it into the ground in pursuit of a passion project – and that’s the only way to describe Horizon Worlds that makes sense. Complaints about poor graphics, buggy programming, and a complete lack of interest in the space, even from Meta’s employees, should have buried this metaverse a long time ago.
As the last point, it may simply be that metaverse concepts are too far ahead of their time to find success, as shared spaces are an attractive proposition. Just look at MMOs. For now, though, Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, and Horizon Worlds need damage control more than anything else.
