Meta’s flagship metaverse platform falls well short of its user goal: Report
FOX Business’ Stuart Varney claims Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is running his company “in the ditch” after the value of his business fell by $251 billion.
About a year after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg rebranded his company to Meta Platforms Inc. and shifted its focus to the metaverse, the transition is struggling to gain traction, internal documents show.
Horizon Worlds, a free virtual reality online video game created by Meta Platforms Inc., has failed to meet internal performance expectations, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Internal documents obtained by the outlet show that Meta set a goal of 500,000 monthly active users by the end of this year, and although Zuckerberg said the transition to the metaverse would take the company years to fully achieve, the company revised the estimate to 280,000.
The current number of users is under 200,000, according to the Wall Street Journal.
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Mark Zuckerberg, via video, speaks at the 2022 SXSW Conference and Festivals at the Austin Convention Center on March 15, 2022, in Austin, Texas. (Samantha Burkardt/Getty Images for SXSW/Getty Images)
The documents show that most Horizon users usually stop using the app after the first month and that the user base has been consistently declining since the spring.
Meta’s popular social media products, including Facebook and Instagram, serve more than 3.5 billion average monthly customers compared to Horizon’s current numbers, which equates to less than the population of Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
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Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta Platforms Inc., speaks at the Meta Connect virtual event in New York, USA. (Michael Nagle/Bloomberg via Getty Images/Getty Images)
The Wall Street Journal reported that Horizon’s vast collection of virtual spaces where users appear as avatars and interact with others around the world is sparsely used, with only 9% of worlds built by creators being visited by at least 50 people, and many never being visited at all at all.
Complaints about “bugs” in the platform forced Meta to put Horizon on “lockdown” last month, meaning new features will be put on hold until the bugs are fixed, the outlet reported.
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Facebook’s Meta logo sign is seen at the company’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California. (AP Photo/Tony Avelar, File/AP Newsroom)
Meta shares have also fallen more than 60% in the past year, The Wall Street Journal reported, to go along with the company losing more than $700 billion in market value since September 2021.
This week, Zuckerberg unveiled a new virtual reality headset known as the Quest Pro, which he said will innovate standards in the metaverse tech world at a unit cost of $1,500.
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Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Fox News Digital.
