The Metaverse, once touted as the next big thing in tech, has officially fallen from grace. The idea of a fully immersive virtual world where people could interact with each other and with digital objects seemed like a dream come true. But the reality was far from it, as the Metaverse failed to gain traction and live up to its hype.
The Hype and Promise of the Metaverse
The hype around the Metaverse was fueled by the vague promises of a single CEO. Mark Zuckerberg and his company, Meta, formerly known as Facebook, invested over $100 billion in research and development on the Metaverse, with the goal of making it their flagship product. However, the company failed to convince people to use the product it had staked its future on.
The Brutal Downfall of the Metaverse
The Metaverse fell seriously ill as the economy slowed and the hype around generative AI grew. Despite the billions of dollars invested and the breathless hype around a half-baked concept, people never really used the Metaverse.
Decentraland, the most well-funded, decentralized, crypto-based Metaverse product, only had around 38 daily active users in its "$1.3 billion ecosystem." Meta's much-heralded efforts similarly struggled, with its Horizon Worlds platform having less than 200,000 monthly active users by October 2022, dramatically short of the 500,000 target Meta had set for the end of 2022.
In January 2023, Microsoft shuttered its virtual-workspace platform AltSpaceVR, laid off the 100 members of its "industrial metaverse team," and made a series of cuts to its HoloLens team. Disney and Walmart also shuttered their Metaverse divisions, leading to thousands of people losing their jobs.
The Lessons Learned
Despite the idea of virtual worlds or collective online experiences living on in some form, the Capital-M Metaverse is dead. It was preceded in death by a long line of tech fads like Web3 and Google Glass. The death of the Metaverse should be remembered as arguably one of the most historic failures in tech history.
The fact that Mark Zuckerberg has clearly stepped away from the Metaverse is a damning indictment of everyone who followed him and anyone who still considers him a visionary tech leader.
It should also be the cause for some serious reflection among the venture-capital community, which recklessly followed Zuckerberg into blowing billions of dollars on a hype cycle founded on the flimsiest possible press-release language.