Facebook Metaverse Failures
Despite the hype surrounding the metaverse when people learned about it, many things are going wrong for metaverse companies. Looking at the revenue generated in 2021 and 2022, one can see that many things have gone wrong in the industry. The metaverse world went from making $18.9bn across 311 deals in 2021 to just $5bn across 283 in 2022.
While many might argue that the metaverse is still in its early stages of development, one needs to look at the adoption rate of the emerging technology. Meta being at the forefront of the metaverse, will be used to analyze the failures the metaverse is experiencing.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is the brain behind most of the moves that are happening within the virtual world. Despite the billionaire's criticism, he believes the metaverse will be part of the future.
There's a truth that the metaverse will become part of the future at some point. But at what cost?
Horizon Worlds was the first project that Meta launched to consolidate their place in the virtual world. This flagship project was created so that users can explore and marvel at the wonder of the metaverse. However, Mark Zuckerberg and his team have a very serious problem. Nobody has been exploring the virtual world they spent billions of dollars building.
In fact, other metaverse companies with lower financial capacity are attracting more users to their platforms than Facebook. Decentraland and The Sandbox have 38 and 522 daily active users, respectively; they are much higher than the daily users Horizon Worlds records in a day. When their community size is also compared, The Sandbox and Decentraland have more community members who support their project than the Facebook metaverse.
The major reason why Mark Zuckerberg and his team are experiencing such losses is that users complain most of their products are substandard. In addition to the substandard products, many have complained of their VR products being outright overpriced. Their Horizon Worlds VR headset is priced at an outrageous $1,500.
Apart from their VR headsets and physical products, their virtual world is also said to be poor with its graphics. Many have compared the graphics in their metaverse to games produced in the 1990s. In addition, Mark Zuckerberg has been mocked for creating a metaverse whose occupants have no legs. It has been reported that even Meta employees already have doubts about the project's success. But they can't do anything as Mark Zuckerberg makes the final decision for the project.
Being hot-headed over a failing project comes at a cost; Meta, which was once a once-trillion-dollar is now worth less than $300 billion, and it has been involved in a massive layoff of more than 11,000 employees. While the effect of the Meta virtual world project might be hitting hard at the company itself, it has also been affecting the crypto industry severely.
