According to the “Wall Street Journal”, Meta Horizon Worlds had less than 200,000 users at the end of October, for an initial objective of 500,000 active users by the end of the year.
by Vincent Fagot
Meta, formerly Facebook, would he have managed in a few months to cut the branch on which he was seated? The wealthy company of Mark Zuckerberg had thus renamed itself at the end of October 2021, making the development of the metarers its new CAP. By launching Horizon Worlds, in December of the same year, she thought she could be the first to give shape to this project allowing everyone to have a complete digital existence. Just this year, $ 15 billion (almost the equivalent in euros) would have been engulfed by the company to achieve its ends … for a more than disappointing result.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Horizon Worlds had less than 200,000 users at the end of October, for an initial objective of 500,000 active users by the end of the year. After barely a month, the majority of users would have deserted the application.
Many have also mocked the graphic representations of the characters in this virtual world, with avatars without legs. Finally, the analyzes on the use of virtual reality headsets offered by Facebook, supposed to offer the main gateway to its metarers, were hardly more exciting: after six months, their buyers had abandoned them.
Distrust of investment funds
The height of irony, The Verge revealed that, even internally, Meta employees had very few venturing into Horizon Worlds. “If we do not like it, how to hope that users adopt it?” Asked Vishal Shah, vice-president in charge of Meta’s metarers. While ordering order to its employees to be more present on this platform, Meta admitted that it was not successful enough, full of bugs, to attract a large number of users.
The biggest tech owners in the United States – never stingy with spikes between them – have not been tender with Meta. “I am not sure that the average individual can tell you what the Metals is,” said Tim Cook, the boss of Apple, in an interview with Dutch media RTL Nieuws. The boss of Snapchat, Evan Spiegel, speaks, him, of an “ambiguous and hazardous” concept. Even the biggest investment funds display their distrust. Jan Hammer, one of the main investors in Europe for the Index Ventures fund, opens it frankly: “We see a lot of business plan around the metarers, but that leaves us skeptical,” he explains to the world. “There was a ridiculous escalation. Bloomberg who talks about a market of $ 800 billion in 2024, it makes no sense,” also estimates Thomas Husson, of the cabinet forrester.
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