I am aware that the statement that gives title to this publication may seem mine, because when I write about the Metaverse it is, as a general rule, in a rather negative tone, although on more than one occasion I have clarified that I have nothing against it. of this platform. From an objective perspective, I have a hard time seeing the future in the short and medium term, but that doesn’t mean I’m happy about it or anything like that. I wish what was promised in its announcement could be true, that kind of Ready Player One. However, today it is more comparable, in many ways, to a Second Life sparsely populated by Miis (the avatars of Nintendo Wii).
Thus, and to avoid it seeming that defining the Metaverse as a purely tourist coastal town, which at the end of the summer becomes an amalgam of all collected, lowered shutters and deserted streets, I must clarify that, as we can read in The Wall Street Journal, I’m just basing myself on what is stated in an internal Meta reportin which you can read that, speaking about the reduced use of its platform, «An empty world is a sad world«, «An empty world is a sad world«and the fact is that today, and despite Meta’s efforts to avoid it, the Metaverse is not a very populated (cyber) space.
goal initially aimed to reach 500,000 monthly active users in Horizon Worlds, the gateway to the Metaverse, by the end of this 2022. However, the current figure is less than 200,000 according to said internal report that, among other things, states that not even the Meta workers themselves are particularly inclined to use the platform. This has given rise, as we told you in that publication, to the fact that employees have been required to fall in love with the Metaverse, starting with Horizon Worlds, something that they will only achieve, according to managers, by using it regularly.
And if those data that we gave you a few days ago were already bad, behind closed doors, what was published by TWSJ shows that theThe situation, from the outside, is even worse, with the aggravating circumstance that, in this case, potential users cannot be required to access the service every day, as it would be suggesting to workers.
And the fact is that the data is even worse than it might seem because, when talking about 200,000 users, one might think that the key is that the service continues to grow over time… but the truth is that what it is doing is descending. Internal documents show that most users did not return to the Metaverse after the first month on the platform, and the number of users has been steadily declining since the spring. Thus, except for surprises, it seems that winter in the Metaverse will add “cold” to “sad and empty.” Meta was talking about 300,000 monthly active users at the beginning of the year, so we are talking about a 33% decrease in around two quarters, and with no signs that this trend can be reversed.
In other circumstances this would already be negative, but we must add the growing unease of investors, who know that Meta has already invested $15 billion in the Metaverse, but due to Meta’s lack of transparency in this regard, they claim, are completely unaware of what it has been spent on. We can imagine that a small part will have gone to provide the avatars with legs, and that a somewhat larger pinch will have been dedicated to the design and production of the Meta Quest Pro, an investment that we understand that it will aspire to recover with the sale of this top viewer. of range. But still, it’s a lot, too much money, for it to have been used alone for both.
