Facebook went so all-in on this idea, they renamed their whole company. So a headline like this has gotta sting . . .
“Business Insider” says the metaverse is already DEAD. They posted a jokey obituary with the headline “R.I.P. Metaverse”.
Facebook went all-in on it in late 2021, so not even two years ago. That’s when they announced they were dumping tons of money into building a virtual reality universe for people to hang out in, and renamed their parent company “Meta.”
According to the obit, they’ve basically abandoned the idea, and they’re going all-in on A.I. research instead. The article joked that the metaverse was “preceded in death” by other failed tech ideas, like Google’s “smart glasses” called Google Glass.
To be clear, Facebook isn’t shutting down its virtual reality platform “Horizon Worlds.” They actually just claimed the metaverse could add as much as $760 billion to the U.S. economy by 2035.
But Mashable recently called Horizon Worlds a “ghost town” after it only had 200,000 monthly users by the end of 2022. Facebook’s goal was 500,000.
Also, a lot of big businesses that jumped on the metaverse train early have already hopped off. Disney, Microsoft, and Walmart all recently cut their metaverse projects.
Since 2021, Meta has dumped over $100 BILLION into research and development for it. To put that in perspective, the entire company is worth around $600 billion. That’s down from just over a trillion in 2021.
