Meta's flagship metaverse platform falls well short of user goal: Report
Meta reportedly fell far short of its active user goal for its Horizon Worlds project
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Roughly a year after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg rebranded his company as Meta Platforms Inc. and shifted its focus to the metaverse, the transition is struggling to gain traction, internal documents show.
Horizon Worlds, a free virtual reality online video game created by Meta Platforms Inc., has failed to meet internal performance expectations, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Internal documents obtained by the outlet show that Meta set a 500.000 monthly active users goal by the end of this year, and although Zuckerberg said the transition to the metaverse would take the company years to fully achieve, the company revised the projection to 280,000.
The current tally of users sits at less than 200,000, according to Wall Street Journal.
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Mark Zuckerberg, via video, speaks at the 2022 SXSW Conference and Festivals at Austin Convention Center on March 15, 2022, in Austin, Texas. (Samantha Burkardt/Getty Images for SXSW / Getty Images)
The documents show that most Horizon users typically stop using the app after the first month and that the user base has been consistently declining since the spring.
Meta’s popular social media products, including Facebook and Instagram, serve more than 3.5 billion average monthly customers compared to Horizon’s current numbers, which are equivalent to less than the population of Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
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Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Meta Platforms Inc., speaks during the virtual Meta Connect event in New York, US. (Michael Nagle/Bloomberg via Getty Images / Getty Images)
The Wall Street Journal reported that Horizon’s vast collection of virtual spaces where users appear as avatars and interact with others across the world are sparsely used, and only 9% of worlds built by creators are visited by at least 50 people, with many never being visited at all.
Complaints about "bugs" in the platform forced Meta to put Horizon on "lockdown" last month, which means new features will be paused until glitches are rectified, the outlet reported.
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Facebook's Meta logo sign is seen at the company headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif. (AP Photo/Tony Avelar, File / AP Newsroom)
Meta shares are also down more than 60% over the past year, The Wall Street Journal reported, to go along with the company losing more than $700 billion in market value since September 2021.
This week, Zuckerberg revealed a new virtual-reality headset known as the Quest Pro, which he said will innovate standards in the metaverse technology world at a per unit cost of $1,500.
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Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Fox News Digital.