Formerly known as Facebook, the firm now going by the name Meta aspires to be the pioneer in creating an open metaverse, defined as a virtual environment in which people can work, play, and live. But the metaverse development is proving challenging for Meta as Horizon Worlds has significantly underachieved compared to predictions.
Horizon Worlds is the name of Meta’s online playground. The concept behind Horizon Worlds is for it to be packed with user-created worlds that other gamers can explore and interact with. The only problem is it’s not entirely living up to the great expectations it set for itself. It has glitches, is dull, and, worst of all, has no users.
The Wall Street Journal has come into possession of internal memos demonstrating that Horizon World is collapsing. Compared to the cumulative average users of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, roughly half of all live human beings on planet Earth, Meta’s objective for Horizon Worlds was to acquire 500,000 new users by the end of the year. This is a laughably small number of people. Unfortunately for Meta, internal memos suggest that the current user count for Horizon World is lower than 200,000, and the company has decided to increase its user goal for the end of the year to 280,000.
But it looks like Horizon Worlds will only be able to accomplish that objective after a while. According to a study in The Journal, most users do not return after the first month, and the user base has gradually decreased since the spring. In addition, the vast majority of the world is utterly devoid of players, and just 9% of the user-created places have ever seen any player traffic.
As stated in one memorandum, “an empty planet is a sad world,” Horizon Worlds’ predicament can be summed up in a few words.
