What’s going on with the Metaverse? Zuckerberg’s company sinks deeper and deeper for “ambitious” project

Exactly 11 days are missing from the publication of this note for the first anniversary of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg’s company that was previously called Facebook Inc. Yes, that company that encompasses the most popular social networks (such as Instagram and WhatsApp). That change was due to his new great project: the Metaverse, which today is costing millions to who was the youngest millionaire of the last decade and that, quite possibly, will cost him his job.

The great question that remains unanswered is whether we will have to spend all day with Virtual Reality viewers to participate in the metaverse. The creator of Facebook has already tried to warn that this will not be the case, and that the periods of time that they are in the metaverse should be prudent. So what is going on?

There are three situations to define about the current crisis of the Meta metaverse: internal commitment problems, low public acceptance and Zuckerberg’s eagerness to constitute it.

Zuckerberg and Meta have invested more than 10 billion dollars in the creation of the Metaverse. Employs more than 10,000 workers in the matter

Let’s start from the second point, that worrying information was revealed today about the company’s efforts to make its project profitable. To that end, we mention Horizon Worlds, a free-to-play virtual reality online video game with an integrated game creation system developed and published by Meta Platforms. This is accessible through the viewers -also developed by the company- Oculus Quest.

It was precisely launched in December of last year, with the aim of giving a “peek” of what the company’s Metaverse will be. In fact, it has been in closed beta for longer, and at the time of open source it had a base of 30,000 users. In a matter of two months, as of February 2022, it had a 10-fold increase in users, reaching a rate of 300,000 active monthly.

This encouraged, to a certain extent, the team, who set the goal of having half a million players by the end of the year. However, as of October the figures are discouraging. As reported by the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) about internal company documents, Horizon Worlds has an active user base of under 200 thousand.

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And that’s not all, now they are satisfied with reaching the end of the year with a goal of 280,000, of which a large part are (or should be) Meta workers. But we will talk about them in the next point.

What's going on with the Metaverse?
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, with the new virtual reality headsets.

READ ALSO: Vice president of product design resigns and Zuckerberg is left without allies

Priced at $400 to access the platform through the Quest 2 headset, the metaverse is still not accessible to the casual user. Those who have the opportunity to test the technology experience puzzling brand content, persistent bugs, and empty worlds with no user interactions. Even the employees don’t seem to enjoy the platform, saying there is a “quality” problem.

There’s still more. WSJ assures that of the ten thousand worlds that HW currently has, only 9% are visited by half of the users. Most are never visited at all. “An empty world is a sad world”said a document that summarizes the company’s efforts to take users to places where they would meet others, the media reports.

Even those who buy the viewers tend to leave HW in a month, the newspaper highlights. It is worth mentioning that the latest model, glasses with headphones called Meta Quest Prointroduced a week ago, will be priced at $1,500.

A spokesperson for Meta told The Wall Street Journal that the company continues to make improvements to the metaverse, which was always intended to be a multi-year project.

What's going on with the Metaverse?
Horizon Worlds.

“Make Mark happy”: project employees are not committed to it

Let’s take a step back and go to the first situation mentioned. The development team of the metaverse feels “weary” and “bored” with the metaverse, so much so that it has generated problems between employees and managers, the latter who pressure the work group to get fully involved.

Zuckerberg and company encourage project workers to use “their creation” for work functions, and even urge them to use it in their daily lives. In an email a few days ago, one of the managers said that they “should love the metaverse”, while the employees themselves maintained, anonymously, that they must “please” the boss and cannot show their rejection. They even force them to use it even if they don’t have the necessary equipment.

In a recent New York Times report, two Meta employees pointed out that the team coined a phrase, “Make Mark happy”, shortened to the acronym “MMH” (Make Mark happy, in English). Both pointed out that there are several who use the abbreviation to refer, in a mocking tone, to the projects that are proposed on the metaverse.

The situation reached such a point that Meta made silent layoffs in recent months, and that could continue to affect 15% of the payroll.

On the other hand, Zuckerberg’s new magnum opus, which far from being an attractive project, made him lose billions of dollars in the last year, nothing more than US$76.8 billion. This earned him his position in the top 10 richest men in the world, and in one year, he too has dropped from 3rd to 11th in America.

In the 11 days since Facebook’s switch to Meta, the company’s shares have fallen nearly 60%. We leave you with what was the very presentation of the metaverse and Meta that October 28, 2021.

Should Mark Zuckerberg step down as CEO?

Some may say that the businessman is obsessed with the metaverse, a blind faith that has cost him, as we have seen in this article, a large part of his fortune and that of his company. When a manager makes bad decisions, 3 things can happen; he pulls himself together and fixes the situation, resigns or is fired.

For specialist and business analyst Brittain Ladd, the best thing Zuckerberg can do is step aside.

“Sheryl Sandberg, or someone else, should have been named CEO of Facebook. Zuckerberg should have resigned to partner with Microsoft, Zetta Empire and others to create an independent company: Meta. This strategy would protect Facebook’s 3.5 billion customers and allow Meta to operate as a private company out of sight of investors and the press. Sandberg has left the company, but it’s not too late for Zuckerberg to step down and make Meta a separate company. If she doesn’t, Zuckerberg risks killing Facebook.

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What’s going on with the Metaverse? Zuckerberg’s company sinks deeper and deeper for “ambitious” project