In October 2021, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg sent his trillion-dollar social media company in a brand new direction. Facebook has modified its name to Meta and Zuckerberg had his sights set on a brand new horizon, the metaverse.
“At the time, there was a real need and desire for Facebook, the company, to rebrand itself as something different,” said Leo Gebbie, principal analyst and director at CCS Insight. “The Facebook company wanted to make it clear that it was more than just this one social website.”
While the term “Metaverse” predates Facebook, Zuckerberg's Metaverse ambitions have existed inside Meta since 2014, when Facebook purchased virtual reality headset developer Oculus and Reality Labs launched. Seven years and a worldwide pandemic later, the video game industry's global revenue peaked $193 billion. Meta – and Wall Street – saw a possibility to capitalize on the growing online population and ride the wave of virtual reality headsets.
“In 2020 and 2021, there was kind of a feeling that this was a technology that was ready and that it was finally going to make a big breakthrough,” Gebbie said. “We’ve had a lot of misconceptions about virtual reality in the past.”
In December 2021, Horizon Worlds launched within the US and marked Meta's entry into the open-world virtual reality platform space. Meta had a short-term goal: 500,000 monthly lively users in Horizon Worlds by the tip of the yr. However, the long-term goals were more ambitious. In June 2022, Zuckerberg told CNBC's Jim Cramer that he expected a billion users “doing hundreds of dollars in e-commerce each” by the tip of the last decade.
The company still has a really long solution to go.
An insider report published by the Wall Street Journal In 2022, Horizon Worlds was found to have only about 200,000 monthly lively users, lower than a yr after launch. And now, three years later, the term metaverse has largely disappeared from public discussion Google Trends notes a pointy decline in searches for the term after 2022.
To make matters worse, Reality Labs is losing money and has racked up $58 billion in operating losses since 2020.
Meta didn’t reply to CNBC's request for comment.
What happened to the metaverse? What exactly is the metaverse? And where is Meta today? Watch the video to learn more.
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