That's the thing though, there is interest in "metaverse" style programs. VRChat, the biggest one, got 80k concurrent users last month (all time peak) according to SteamDB. Seems low, but hardware is a limiting factor for them.
What happened is Facebook's version of this was a corporatized, simplified, G-rated fraction of what its competition is. Despite being in a medium where the defining factor is the ability to look out the eyes of anything vaguely humanoid, you could only be a generic human who only exists from the waist up, devoid of almost any self expression beyond maybe accessories or retexturing.
As a result, there was no audience: the people who already use VR aren't going to go to an inferior product. And the people who would buy a VR headset aren't going to waste their time on a ghost town.
They hoped it would be a platform for fitness classes, business meetings, college classrooms, shopping, attending concerts [1] and so on.
If the primary appeal of your VR universe is that your avatar can be an anthropomorphic banana, an anime girl, a furry, a giant penis with legs - that's never going to become a 300-million-user platform.
They were all smooshed together with ~2000 non-game dev engineers and told to learn on the job.
[1]not by me; Mark, you can sue Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Oct ‘25)
I mean the inherent appeal of VR is self-expression; being who you want to be, seeing the worlds you want to see. You won't get 300 million users with corporate slop either. That maybe works once, if ever, VR headsets become an interface suitable for white collar work, which they currently very much aren't, and then it wouldn't be the next Facebook - it'd be the next Microsoft Teams. Which is not really in line with Meta's other offerings, though they certainly wouldn't say no to it I guess. But I think a 500-user survey is all it would take to get a very clear signal that current VR is NOT about to replace Teams.
No reasonable person shared this expectation. It was Juicero-tier delusion.
I'm absolutely sure there is a massive market (or at least user base) for a metaverse but until spending more time in VR than reality is mainstream, the audience is the underground clubbers and kids behind the bike sheds of the digital world.
Also you missed furries from your audience group, there is overlap but it is a pretty distinctive group that is actively drawn towards VR for creative expression.
But it is definitely limited by hardware and while it is constantly growing, its growth is dependent on there being a supply of relatively cheap hardware.
The problem here is that "the metaverse" has a specific meaning, and that meaning was a Potemkin-elevator-pitch.
People were envisioning the ability to take a rocket launcher from Halo and use it directly in all your other games. Which is a fun sketch*, but nobody thought past the sketch into any concept of why any game developer would support that, well, meta.
To the extent that VRChat gets around this, it's because it's being a playground rather than a meta-game. So, again, the "meta" part isn't there, at least not to the extent envisioned by people who saw Ready Player One and thought "Yes! Also, I like what Nolan Sorrento is saying, how many more ads can we put into our stuff?"
Though I’m personally happy to see massive corporations spend their money on pushing the state of the art in niche fields instead of using it for more evil stuff. I’m not sure why people care that they burn their own money on risky bets, that’s great for my point of view. We need more of that
Metas investments into VR make abundant sense as an effort to capitalize on a market where Meta was leading, has mindshare, and owns the platform (Oculus). If the bet paid off, or pays off, it would create a sorely lacking competitive moat and potentially provide Enterprise inroads where Meta is otherwise a non-player.
Apple went down the same road, they see the same potential profits. I don’t think either is guilty of contemporaneous dot-com-boom thinking or investments with regard to VR/AR.
Carmack was on board, he remembers Pets.com too.
It was a cool concept, when you were dreaming it up while taking a shower in the morning getting ready for work thinking about the next big idea.
However, it's like those weird Uber/Lyft scooters that popped up in the 2010s. Those things were a cool concept too. However, we got to see right away that it was a terrible business idea for all kinds of reasons.
It took Meta several years (decade +) and 10s of billions of dollars and layoffs to realize, AR was a terrible business idea.
VR is a fun hobby though, and Oculus definitely owns that space.
I don't think they've learnt that. Orion, the "new" glasses should have shipped in 2020q4.
I think we need more wonderful technology that is designed for brief high-value periods of use.
A good example: I get huge value from using AI, but cumulatively I spend perhaps two to three hours a week using Claude or Gemini. Quality products that I appreciate but don't need to spend a lot of time with.
Would align with recent reports of meta employees watching the videos coming off their sunglasses
The metaverse is what happens when you let your leadership/product team convince you that the key to speed up what you want to deliver is to throw people at the problem, and not put any constraints on deliverables.
The original plan for oculus is to establish a VR eco system that would have transitioned into AR glasses, allowing facebook to have a platform of its own.
VR was/is a bit niche, because it required lots of expensive hardware, and there were limited games/uses.
first logical step: remove the need for a high end PC, make the thing cheap.
That drops one barrier to adoption: expense.
The next one is, great I have this $400 device that does VR, but what can I actually _do_ on it? That means you need content and features. This is where it all turned to shit. Zuck looked at steam, and itunes and said: "make it so", and they started tapping up devs to make small games, and AAA to make big ones.
But, its expensive to port games, and it takes time, why not buy studios that are making great games and get them to make more? so they bought a bunch of indie studios. Those studios had to fight to keep their devs, because facebook normally fires/rehires, forcing everyone to re-interview for their job. Games devs aren't really hired because they don't pass the technicals (Don't know why, given that games devs need to be good or the FPS drops like shit.)
with all that upheaval, those games studios don't really produce extra games to sell.
All the while a small team had been making a roblox clone. It was slow and a bit buggy, and you could make shitty games. During lockdown we all had a play. Needed a new generation of hardware to work properly, because it was a unity game with a bunch of hacks to allow custom maps and rules.
Never mind, we are doing E N T E R P R I S E now. enter work rooms. Again a small initiative, which basically asked, can we make better VC if we are in VR? The answer is yes, yes you can, but selling it is hard. There were a lot of hard problems to solve, like needed to detect keyboards, how do you present your screen if you can see your computer? how can you do computer passthrough or virtual monitors in VR?
Zuck saw this and jizzed his pants, so made it a priority. This meant the small team (probably less than 40) swelled to like 4000. Most of the people who moved were not games devs, or had ever worked in graphics/3d. This meant that loads of silly lessons had to be learnt in prod. Nothing was stable, everything was high friction, and no, there was no public API to allow you third parties to integrated into the app.
For the longest time it took >5 minutes to join a VR meeting.
Basically Zuck loves features, and cant understand that user experience is way way more important than features. He throws engineers at the problem which means that instead of solving product issues, they endup solving people issues.
