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...
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I think it should be obvious we are discussing Mark Zuckerberg's Metaverse, not the vision of Steven Spielberg etc.
Anyhoo, email I received today:
Meta Horizon Worlds on Meta Quest is being discontinued
Starting June 15, 2026, you will no longer be able to build, publish or update VR worlds. In addition, you will no longer be able to access Meta Horizon Worlds on Meta Quest headsets. After this date, you can continue to enjoy worlds on the Meta Horizon mobile app.
This change is part of our focus on mobile development, bringing new experiences to even more people. Your Meta Quest headset and other VR apps are unaffected by this change.
We’re grateful for your creativity and participation in Meta Horizon Worlds on Meta Quest.
... so yes, it's "a bit early" to say the Metaverse has failed. Let's say it on June 15th 😄.
(nothing I say here are official statements, this is just me speaking with my insights as a long time VR enthusiast / indie game dev)
I personally never looked deeply into Horizon Worlds. I wouldn't really call it a meta verse in the way scifi writers describe it. I think of the metaverse as more of a store platform + social network, supporting a collection of persistently online VR game worlds (ie, mmorpgs) which offer maximum immersion with cross platform play. Has Meta, Steam, Epic, or Sony made one? Not really. imho, a current problem is that VR is still a very niche market, and for the metaverse to be financially self sustainable, it needs a high enough volume of users. There's probably bigger tough unsolved business problems to handle long before any unsolved tech problems get handled - you can have the right product/service and just be too early to market. In the past, I've seen start ups fail for this exact reason. Will there be a metaverse in the distant future? probably, but it likely won't look like anything any of us can imagine today - its like trying to predict the modern internet in 1995.