Meta’s Horizon Worlds Pulling Less Than Half The Targeted Users

During its inception, Metaverse was all the hype in the tech and gaming community, with some envisioning it as the future of the digital world. However, the results have not been great, as obviously apparent by the desolate conditions of Meta’s flagship Metaverse, Horizon Worlds. 

Horizon Worlds is Meta’s online metaverse platform, a nexus of virtual worlds where people can interact, play, and work together. It pledges to be an online social and gaming platform where users are interconnected all across the globe through the allure of virtual reality.

Unfortunately for the vision, internal documents featured by The Wall Street Journal show disappointing results, with users and the overall gaming community not showing as much interest as Mark Zuckerberg had initially expected. The report mostly discusses the statistics of Meta’s flagship Metaverse application, Horizon Worlds.

Major Takeaway:

• Meta’s flagship metaverse, Horizon Worlds, is toiling hard to attract less than half the targeted monthly users, as revealed by the internal documents.
• According to the report, most players do not visit the app after a month.
• Most user-created worlds are either barren or never visited; less than 1% ever create a world.
• The company has lost over $700 billion in market value since its pinnacle in September 2021.

As per the internal documents, Meta originally set an objective of accumulating 500,000 monthly active users for Horizon Worlds by the end of this year. However, in a few weeks, the numerals seemed to have dropped all the way down to 280,000. The documents reveal that the current total is less than half the target, a mere 200,000.

The overall player count has been plunging since spring. Horizon Worlds has been struggling to attract and retain its users; players do not revisit the application again after the first month. More than half of the purchased Quest headsets are also no longer utilized after 6 months of usage, as per the people aware of the records.

Most of Horizon Worlds’ user-created worlds are “mostly barren of users.” Internal statistics in the document also unveiled that only 9 percent of virtual worlds built by the community are visited by 50 or more people. Moreover, only less than 1 percent of players contribute to building user-created worlds.

Most of the worlds never receive any users at all, leaving them desolate and barren of any sign of life. Horizon Worlds also does not appear to have worked out for professional purposes when it comes to interactions. Users do not take it seriously and often harass other people.

The document cites, “a female Journal reporter visited one of Horizon’s most popular virtual worlds, the Soapstone Comedy Club. It had about 20 users in it, all appearing as avatars. When the reporter introduced herself and tried to conduct an interview with a small group, one user replied: “You can report on me, baby.”

Virtual worlds are not the reason for the failure of Horizon Worlds, evident by the success of VR in general. The hard access, lack of features, and objectives appear to be its downfall. The Metaverse appears to have adhered to a steep decline, but it does not necessarily mean it will stay that way in the future.

Future updates and more features may just end up putting Horizon Worlds back in the limelight. However, a lot of enhancements need to be made for such a scenario. The company has already lost over $700 billion in market value since its apex in September 2021. Check out a detailed dissection of the whole Metaverse situation here.

What are your thoughts about Meta’s flagship metaverse, Horizon Worlds falling short of meeting even half of its intended users? Do let us know your opinions in the comments below.

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