Facebook’s Pivot To VR Has Failed

Stick a fork in the Metaverse, it’s done

Return to the Convent, by Eduardo Zamacois y Zabala, 1868. The painting depicts a group of monks laughing while a lone monk struggles with an ass.

Facebook’s Metaverse has maybe 200,000 monthly users. And it’s actually gone down. This is nothing. I had more monthly users on my startup (a Sri Lankan food website). For something Mark Zuckerberg is dumping Sri Lanka’s entire GDP into, this is an absolute disaster.

Great products just put numbers on the board. In its first year, Facebook was adding 100,000 users a month, hitting 1 million users by year one. Facebook changed its whole-ass name to Meta one year ago, and this is all they have to show? There’s no debate about whether the Metaverse is a failure. Numbers don’t lie.

Note that I’m not saying VR isn’t cool—VRChat is still cool—I’m just saying that Facebook’s Metaverse™️ is dead. Their attempt to brand, buy, and platform an entire category just didn’t work. Not only is the category of VR not big enough, Facebook fucking sucks at it. They just figured out legs.

Many analysts dwell on why Facebook’s Metaverse sucks so much, as in the content, but it ultimately doesn’t matter. The startup game is all about user numbers and growth, and Facebook has neither. Just look at these projections. They’re both pathetic and they’ll still miss them:

According to the WSJ, Meta’s aiming to reach 280,000 monthly active Horizon…