Why did the metaverse fail?
What went wrong? It's an interesting concept, however, how did Meta end up spending 70B in this project? Using the metahuman, I myself built a whole pipeline that skins and copies blendshapes wit...
Forum Discussion
Agreed.
The metaverse failed because Meta tried to build an entire virtual ecosystem alone, instead of creating an open platform developers could adopt. Most of the $70B went into hardware R&D, massive staffing, long‑term AR/VR research, and infrastructure, not the avatar system. VR adoption stayed low, Horizon Worlds didn't gain traction, and the strategy was too top‑down.
Meta's biggest missed opportunity was not opening their avatar system as a cross‑platform SDK. If they had let developers use Meta avatars across games - with shared identity, cosmetics, and revenue sharing - they could have built a self‑growing ecosystem instead of a costly walled garden.