Meta’s ‘Horizon Worlds’ Has Somehow Lost 100,000 Players In Eight Months

Games Meta’s ‘Horizon Worlds’ Has Somehow Lost 100,000 Players In Eight Months Paul Tassi Senior Contributor Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. News and opinion about video games, television, movies and the internet. Following New! Follow this author to stay notified about their latest stories.

Got it! Oct 17, 2022, 10:20am EDT | New! Click on the conversation bubble to join the conversation Got it! Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin Zuckerberg Meta I’m not sure how much louder an alarm bell could be, signaling that Mark Zuckberg’s metaverse is losing, rather than gaining steam. A new report from the Wall Street Journal says that Horizon Worlds, Meta’s flagship social VR app now has 200,000 monthly users, according to internal documents, a drop from 300,000, the last public figures Meta proudly shared back in February 2022. The documents indicate that Meta set a goal that Horizon Worlds would continue to increase its initial gains, where the metaverse space rapidly swelled its growth by 10x in three months to hit that 300,000 figure.

The idea was that Horizon Worlds would hit 500,000 monthly players by the end of 2022, which would be slowed growth, but still substantial. Then, seeing that wasn’t remotely possible, that goal dropped to 280,000 by the end of 2022, and currently, there are less than 200,000 monthly players. What’s happening, the documents show, is that most visitors to Horizon don’t return to it after the first month, hence the stark declines even as VR sales inch upwards.

As someone who myself has set down now two different Oculus VR sets and rarely picked them up again after my first month of use, I can now see that apparently that’s pretty regular behavior. I did wonder why in Facebook’s new Meta Connect showcase we did not hear any actual population figures for Horizon Worlds, as if there was ever a time to give an update, it would have been during that event. But a 33% drop in playerbase over eight months is clearly not something you want to share.

We have gotten additional reports that internally, things are not going great at Horizon, with a “quality lockdown” being instituted to fix bugs and add features, and the embarrassing reveal that even Meta’s own employees have been chastised for not logging into Horizon Worlds enough. That brought with it a now infamous quote from Meta’s VP of Metaverse, Vishal Shah: “Everyone in this organization should make it their mission to fall in love with Horizon Worlds. You can’t do that without using it.

” Horizon Meta MORE FOR YOU Livestream Shopping Stays Hot As Whatnot Valuation More Than Doubles To $3. 7 Billion Is Your BFSI Protecting Your Information? Rosberg Versus Hamilton: Business Lessons To Take From The 2016 Formula One World Championship The other issue here is that it’s hard to see anything that just came out of Meta Connect as moving the needle significantly in Horizon Worlds’ favor. They announced a pricey new headset aimed at enterprise use and super early adopters.

They announced undated avatar updates including better graphics, expression tracking and eventually…legs, albeit in a demo which had to fake the technology because legs aren’t ready yet. Memes abounded. But this is no meme to Meta, it’s meant to be the future of the company according to Zuckerberg.

Horizon Worlds is not all of Meta and its ambitions, but it is the signature app of its VR platform and meant to be the home base of their vision of the metaverse. But if this was a video game, A) 300,000 monthly players is not all that much to begin with in an industry when a game like League of Legends has 180 million monthly players in 2022 and B) any new, ongoing live game that saw a 33% playercount drop in eight months would be deemed as being in pretty poor health and failing to attract new users and retain old ones. The main problem with Horizon Worlds is that right now it’s a place for a niche of a niche.

VR usage, despite recent sales, is still miles behind console, PC and mobile gaming. And within VR, most enthusiasts want to be playing fun video games like Superhot or Beatsaber. Horizon Worlds like a big VR chatroom with strangers most of the time, and even if that does appeal to you, there are alternatives like VRchat that have more features and more creative avatars.

And legs. They have legs. I do not know how Zuckerberg turns around interest in Horizon Worlds.

The Quest Pro headset won’t do it. Simply upgrading avatars won’t do it, legs or not. It is hard to see a future where this thing blossoms into a success for some unknowable reason.

But for now, it still exists as a supposed centerpiece of the future of this entire company. Follow me on Twitter , YouTube , Facebook and Instagram . Subscribe to my free weekly content round-up newsletter, God Rolls .

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