WSJ - Meta's Internal Documents Show Metaverse Falling Short - Declining Users, Most Worlds Never Visited
- Thread starter CommodoreKong
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I cannot wait for the meta verse to fail. Meta/Facebook is doing irreparable harm to our world, destroying elections with unchecked propaganda, and so much more. They need to be broken up or checked hard for all the harm they are doing.
Metaverse has seemed like a grift to get more money from investors since they had unsustainable growth that will only meander or go down from here. Same for Netflix with their issues with subscribers. Feel like the 2010s streaming/social boom is gonna pop this decade and a lot of companies are gonna scale back hard by 2030.
I read somewhere meta is having to force their own employees to use metaverse, which should tell them all they need to know about how well the public will adopt it
Metaverse has seemed like a grift to get more money from investors since they had unsustainable growth that will only meander or go down from here. Same for Netflix with their issues with subscribers. Feel like the 2010s streaming/social boom is gonna pop this decade and a lot of companies are gonna scale back hard by 2030.
I read somewhere meta is having to force their own employees to use metaverse, which should tell them all they need to know about how well the public will adopt it
Absolutely I want an experience that can't be replicated in real life, or some locale that fits my aesthetic tastes.
Heck, they could recreate the Cantina from Star Wars and nerds would be crashing down doors to buy their headsets.
VR and AR itself has an interesting and fun future. Some of the stuff being worked on is absolutely mindblowing, it will just take some time for prices to drop. But that future will have nothing to do with Facebook and some stupid metaverse with shitty Crytivo-type economies. It's a shame that Facebook is helping ruin the perception of the tech itself at the moment, but in the end it won't matter.
Your feelings will get you in trouble then. Good thing you're not running a business.
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Basically. The people still using FB right now dont care about it either as they're using it for exactly what they want to use it for and nothing more.
Using a "metaverse" as the VR killer app just seems like barking up the wrong tree for the medium to me. That's not playing to its strengths, and what's even more damning, you don't need VR to create a virtual world. Look at Fortnite. No, seriously, look at it. That's the competition. You're not beating Fortnite at being Fortnite, even in VR. Not even if you're Meta.
What makes VR appealing to me is being able to do things I can't in real life. I can't be a spaceship pilot. I can't fight a dragon. I can wave my hands to music, but it's more fun in Beat Saber.
So work on that. Might be big sprawling experiences, or just a bite-sized bit of fun. Let me do things that I can't do. If I absolutely have to have a home space in VR, I want it to be in low Earth orbit, with real-time time of day and weather going on. Not in some corporate dystopia. We live in one of those. We don't live in space, making it vastly more interesting.
What makes VR appealing to me is being able to do things I can't in real life. I can't be a spaceship pilot. I can't fight a dragon. I can wave my hands to music, but it's more fun in Beat Saber.
So work on that. Might be big sprawling experiences, or just a bite-sized bit of fun. Let me do things that I can't do. If I absolutely have to have a home space in VR, I want it to be in low Earth orbit, with real-time time of day and weather going on. Not in some corporate dystopia. We live in one of those. We don't live in space, making it vastly more interesting.
I somehow ended up briefly walking into a Metaverse workshop for a job and someone asked 'So why would people go in there and spend money?' and the legit answer the person hosting the workshop gave was 'Good question! I haven't really thought about that...' It was so funny, and really telling since this was at one of the biggest IT firms in the world.
I had no idea it was even available.
I remember some VR Ready Player One thing they were talking about a couple years ago.
Never really gave it any thought though. Sounds like a big fail.
I remember some VR Ready Player One thing they were talking about a couple years ago.
Never really gave it any thought though. Sounds like a big fail.
Nobody wants a G-rated, corporate friendly, safe for advertiser metaverse (assuming most people want a metaverse to begin with). For people who actually want a social space in VR, VR Chat already exists and does it better than Meta's version ever could.
(Personally I couldn't care less about the metaverse, but I know a few people who spend a lot of time in VR Chat - I don't think you'd ever be able to convince them to move to something like Meta's version.)
(Personally I couldn't care less about the metaverse, but I know a few people who spend a lot of time in VR Chat - I don't think you'd ever be able to convince them to move to something like Meta's version.)
Am I supposed to....talk to my loved ones in a Facebook virtual space and be like "this is so much better than the other many ways of doing that where I even get to see your actual face, because now I can see like a shitty cartoon representation of your face instead" I'm so confused by the market for this as well, help me understand this man's candle budget when his company is starving
Thanks! Next step was I had to look up what Horizon Worlds is.
OP
OP
I think there's an argument to be made for things like FF14, and Fortnite to be metaverses if not metaverse-adjacent. Those are games though, they have a central hook for being there in a way that Meta's product doesn't. VR Chat and Second Life incidentally offer you a level of freedom that Meta never could and explicitly doesn't appear to want to.
I tried it. It was pathetic, many worlds have a "my first VR app" flavor to them.
It's just half avatars floating about doing nothing interesting. I was in a room with maybe 7 people with a person that was clearly an employee trying to drum up conversation. Then she turns and says "I will get us drinks!", floats away and comes back with a bunch of glitching bottles hanging by her avatar.
The cringe made me quit. It's pathetic. I hope Meta goes down with it.
It's just half avatars floating about doing nothing interesting. I was in a room with maybe 7 people with a person that was clearly an employee trying to drum up conversation. Then she turns and says "I will get us drinks!", floats away and comes back with a bunch of glitching bottles hanging by her avatar.
The cringe made me quit. It's pathetic. I hope Meta goes down with it.
Same here, i am too, and i thought Horizon Worlds was a game, had no idea it was fb's vr..i still have no desire to try it.
They aren't investing in VR to sell some software here or there, they are doing it because of some ridiculous idea that people will spend huge chunks of their income in an online world.
So we can all laugh at Metabook over their failures, but this could have consequences for other VR development.. games development, etc. as the highly subsidized price of the Quest 2 is likely based on selling virtual houses for as much as a real house, not selling a couple million copies of a game.
So we can all laugh at Metabook over their failures, but this could have consequences for other VR development.. games development, etc. as the highly subsidized price of the Quest 2 is likely based on selling virtual houses for as much as a real house, not selling a couple million copies of a game.
lol
But really, being tasked with artificially drumming up interest in a megalomaniac's dying VR platform sounds like a nightmare job, even if it's WFH.
"Tell your avatar to blink three times quickly if you need help!"
Their cartoonish eyes remain glassy, staring off into the middle distance, underscoring the inner conflict between person and avatar.
An uneasy silence fills the room.
You sense they are trying to see if this is truly their moment to try to flee. The Morale Management Specialist's back is turned, offering a tantalizing opportunity, but they still relent. They may not make it past the war droids at the second marker this time. And we remember what happened the last time they tried to escape, don't we?
Their hand instinctively moves to the location of their new on-brand, Meta skin brand.
"WHO HAD THE WHISKEY NEAT? AND WHO HAD THE FROZEN MARGARITA? WHO HERE LIKES FUN?" they type out instead, disappointing themselves.
Not today.
Not today.
The meta verse is reminiscent of the "internet of things" which people wouldn't STFU about a while back and other such things which will organically develop over time and be a diverse ecosystem....
But the thirst Meta and Zuck have to be the controllers of that ecosystem and be first is pathetic and a bit embarrassing.
But the thirst Meta and Zuck have to be the controllers of that ecosystem and be first is pathetic and a bit embarrassing.
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It's going to be really interesting to see what they do with this information. Do they just keep funnelling money into the pit?
Like, it was always a bad idea and everyone rightfully said so when they announced it. Then they renamed their whole company around it and it is a complete disaster, which is shocking to nobody except higher ups at Meta themselves. So do they course correct somehow and shift their focus to something more viable, or just follow this sunk cost to the end of the road?
Like, it was always a bad idea and everyone rightfully said so when they announced it. Then they renamed their whole company around it and it is a complete disaster, which is shocking to nobody except higher ups at Meta themselves. So do they course correct somehow and shift their focus to something more viable, or just follow this sunk cost to the end of the road?
Yeah. All of the marketing I've seen has seemed to center around stuff like "you can go to meetings, but in VR!"
It's like they didn't talk to any average people about the types of things they might actually be interested in.
It's so weird right, like from my perspective and yours, it's obvious no one wants this, but surely Meta must have hundreds of highly-paid expert researchers working on figuring out what people want, and they've apparently determined that someone does want this. Right? Or is it literally just something Mark Zuckerberg likes and keeps funneling money into despite all the advisors telling him to stop? It just doesn't add up.