I'm not sure I have ever witnessed such a comprehensive industrial failure in the software world. There were some discussions about Facebook's ability to pull it off, but not that long ago, many still saw the "metaverse" vision as inevitable; a clear trajectory for the future of the internet.
And the failure isn't Zuckerberg's alone. Microsoft, Apple, and a good many others all crashed into the same wall.
> And the failure isn't Zuckerberg's alone. Microsoft, Apple, and a good many others all crashed into the same wall.
This is revisionary. Mark Zuckerberg's Meta was the only company to go all-in on the "metaverse". Microsoft has barely even dabbled in an adjacent area with the Hololens.
Apple has essentially zero exposure to anything like the "metaverse". Apple's Spatial Computing and its use of Personas and SharePlay is not like the "metaverse", despite the comparison between Meta's and Apple's efforts being perhaps inevitable.
The metaverse, as Meta pursued it, was a social media virtual reality space, and only one of the three companies you mention touted and offered a product for users in this space.
The goal is to replace displays and interactions by something new, more immersive, spatial and relying on movements rather than mechanical buttons.
And in my opinion they all failed for the same reasons, and it is on the input side.
The idea of a metaverse as a new internet was a way to capture was was seen an an inevitable evolution, but in the grand scheme of things, this is almost anecdotal.
Still, the rename to Meta was a cynical ploy regardless
Well, I think of that more being due to their mismanagement with the whole WMR ecosystem. "Sterile corporate VR meeting rooms" sounds like exactly something that would have been from Microsoft rather than Facebook, but they tried too hard in some aspects (a half dozen companies making nearly-identical-but-not-really headsets! support built into the OS so deep that to remove it they had to brick everyone's headsets!) and not at all in others.
This is revisionist, Microsoft has been tilting at the same windmill for a long time too.
They even created and subsequently removed their own native platform for Windows, used by many hardware vendors, whose products were bricked by the Windows update that removed the feature.
I love my WMR headset, but Microsoft wasn't really pushing hard for the kinds of "social" experiences Meta was trying to get us to participate in.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2022/10/14/mark-zucke...
> During the most talked-about segment of the show, Zuckerberg proudly announced that legs were coming the metaverse, which sounds bizarre out of context (and kind of in-context), but it’s the solution to many years of Meta VR avatars being nothing but floating torsos. He and another Meta worker showed off their new legs by kicking and jumping, and Zuckerberg talked a little bit about legs and why it’s taken so long to get them.
> “I know you’ve been waiting for this. Everyone has been waiting for this,” said Zuckerberg. “But seriously, legs are hard, which is why other virtual reality systems don’t have them either.”
> But it turns out the legs that were shown off with all that kicking and jumping were fake. That was not actually Mark jumping, the sequence was pre-rendered for the show.
I've always been blown away by the fact that they didn't more fully pursue VR gaming. I think they could have found a more enthusiastic audience.
I feel like the main possible benefits that these digital spaces bring, for consumers, are kinda the opposite of things that any Big Corporate Entity would ever want to be involved in.
Not only because of hardware costs, but not everybody can play them for extended periods of time and 'the youth' are increasingly preferring to look at social media over playing games.
- VR sickness
- Lack of physical space in people's homes
- Don't really work as a shared experience without multiple headsets
On top of that, this company in particular is Facebook. Nobody likes Facebook.
It's still an unfocused mess.
The bigger issue is, VR will ALWAYS be a niche thing. Always on AR glasses are the real future bet, not a niche industry.
VR will never be as big as Facebook / Instagram / WhatsApp. It just doesn't make sense to invest so much into it. Not sure what Zuck doesn't see this?
Meta could of been the hardware leader of a thriving ecosystem, but instead they tried to replicate the walled garden of app stores that are failing in 2026.
Glassholes are the future?
VR headsets are at least fun. These glasses though, seem really dumb. I doubt they will ever be ubiquitous. I certainly wouldn't be caught dead wearing a surveillance device made by Facebook of all companies.
I used to work at meta, I was in one of the many research teams that were upstream of horizon.
The Failure was pretty much entirely Zuck's fault, in the same way that when a ship smashes into rocks, its the captain's responsibility.
The first big problem is that there was never a clear definition of what "the metaverse" was mean to be. It was a pivot that kinda appear after orion (the AR glasses that were supposed to ship in 2020 Q3) failed to ship.
A small team had made a VR clone of roblox, where you could make your own games in VR. It was low poly and stuttery on the Quest. Another team was working on getting hand interaction into the quest. A third team thought "hmm, we have a avatar system, what if we can type on keyboards? could we have meetings"
The meeting system and the roblox clone carried on, vaguely separately. Then Zuck saw them and decided that they needed 500 more engineers each. Time passed, progress wasn't fast enough, so more engineers were smeared in.
Then the meta rebrand, and then the whole weird everything smashed together branding.
All the while more engineers were being piled in, most of them had no experience in 3d, let alone games.
But, that would have been fine if someone at the top had been steering, making joined up product decisions, Advocating for the users. carmack sorta tried, but a) he wasn't the easiest to work with and B) Boz thought he knew better
TLDR: Zuck can't product for shit. He thought that shipping disjointed features would make a platform. It didn't. He also thought that dumping 11,000 people into an org, most of which have no experience of games, VR, 3d or graphics would lead to a good outcome.
https://www.meta.com/en-gb/experiences/eleven-table-tennis/1...
The while time I've owned a Quest, I've never felt the need or desire to launch the Horizon App.
Zuck seriously seems to have no clue how to do anything. His entire existence is stealing other people's stuff
Otherwise, look up WSJ reporting on the subject and reddit.
Rumors of future products are never super-reliable, but point to their ambitions being downscaled at best. Really, everyone expects them to pivot to smart glasses, because that's what they clearly wanted to make all along, and there's probably a market for smart glasses in a way there isn't for... whatever the AVP was supposed to be.
The rolled it out like a cheesy corporate team-building mandatory exercise, not something where anyone would want to actually spend any time by choice.
Specifically this part: "Don't post generated comments or AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans."
No one invested that much money into nothing for so long
Look trying out nft and co with your marketing budget yeah for sure, building stuff for a poc but spending that many billions for so long without any results that's just crazy.
Like a college who 'invested' into 3d printing. It feels like just because Zuckerberg was able to do so and in his brain everything has to be billions (come on he will not spend his time on a million dollar project) made this thing going for so long
Delusional I would say
But my take is that, given the efforts of other big player in the same field (Hololens, VisionPro, the VR stuff from Valve, Sony, Samsung, etc.) at least one of them would have gained traction and the entire field would have followed behind.
I think the vision was wrong.
The entire VR/AR industry sort of crumpled up and died while metaverse was still burning a billion dollars a day.
I worked in a VR startup at the time. Nobody could find a customer and all the competing startups slowly bled to death (including mine). Everyone was really holding their breath that Apple Vision would bring some life back to the industry, but once it became clear that it was a flop, everyone gave up.
The Metaverse was not something that Meta was good at, they went about it all wrong and it was doomed to fail.
• The metaverse was never inevitable: Horizon Worlds peaked at 300k MAUs, cratered below 1k DAUs, and is now shutting down. Meta burned $73B building ghost towns; the real survivors (Beat Saber: $255M revenue, VRChat: 150k+ concurrent) succeeded by giving users embodied activities and emotional hooks, not empty virtual offices.
• Hardware wasn’t the problem: Quest 3 is cheap, comfortable, and capable. The comprehensive crash happened because giants chased AAA ports and productivity tools while ignoring what actually retains users: presence + community + meaning.
• Management-school case study, updated: The $70B lesson isn’t “VR died.” It’s that corporate metaverse bets failed exactly where indies and niches thrived.
Full breakdown of what works (and why the giants missed it) here: https://linernotesxr.substack.com/p/what-works-in-vr-lessons...
If a big company embraced an open platform I suspect the space would be far successful. Still a lot of untapped potential.
VRChat is successful because someone can show up in a Goku avatar and start roleplaying. A DJ can stream their twitch steam right into an instance.
VRChat still has no real store system having people upload unity projects manually to use a custom avatar. There's an entire universe of potential revenue if a clothing, avatar, and instance space system was built into the client.
In that regard the long term practice of the artists and users of their creations (mainly avatars) transacting directly via Booth or Gumroad can be seen as healthier & more robust long term.
"Facebook/Meta’s Horizon Worlds is officially sunsetting its VR version in June in a move that will probably make all five of its players sad.
The Mark Zuckerberg metaverse monstrosity has been around since 2020 and was designed as a virtual reality metaverse world back when people were trying to make metaverse things happen and pretending Second Life didn’t exist. (It was a deeply exhausting era.) However, Horizon Worlds’ game/world/metaverse was poorly received and widely mocked, owing largely to dreadful graphics, redundant content, and oh yeah, that whole thing where people didn’t have legs. The boondoggle has led to thousands of layoffs and billions in financial losses, proving it is still possible for companies to lose money trying to make VR happen."
Maybe not everything has to be the next big thing for everyone. Maybe it's valuable for smaller companies or sovereign divisions to find niche markets, and simply build products and services for modest profits for strong customer bases that will never hit hypergrowth. (And are therefore resistant to the cancerous financialization that hypergrowth invites/incites)
I hope they figure out how to make a modest but steady profit making headsets still. The Quest Pro is still my favorite headset, ever since I ditched the awful controllers and went back to Index controllers.
Then again, the Steam Frame is likely to deliver us from this reliance, though it would be really nice to keep having budget headset options.
Like, how did Zuck look at what was being demoed and think "yes, this is worth shipping" at a time when the closest analogue, 3D games and CG movies, were delivering fidelity that was ~4 hardware generations ahead, in implementation and in design.
To be impressed by and willing to sell the world on his metaverse implementation in that state... it felt like the dude hadn't seen any digital 3d entertainment since 2002.
[1] https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/growth-marketing-and-s...
Not caring about what the user's want is the first problem. The second is that they wanted this done yesterday. So rather than evolving the technology and seeing where the market was going, they tried to build the whole thing at once immediately.
They didn't know what they were building, how to build it, and they threw it together as quickly as possible. The result was, unsurprisingly, pretty lame.
Then to justify the expenditure, they then forced it into every aspect of their Quest devices trying to force adoption. Unsurprisingly again, this failed and also pissed off all their Quest customers and damaged the viability of that platform.
Meta thought they could simply spend their billions and that would be enough to succeed.
This has yet to be determined! Because no VR headset so far has actually been a proper PC. You can't develop on them. You can't just install whatever TF you want. You have to use their app store and getting developer mode enabled doesn't even give you root on the device.
A more accurate statement would be, "No one wants to wear a locked-down, extremely limited-use phone on their faces."
When the Steam Frame comes out, then we'll see how much of a difference having full control over your VR hardware can make. It runs SteamOS and you can install whatever you want. It's a complete Linux distro! An actual PC on your face.
Maybe a game library as large as Steam's will make it a little more appealing, but unlikely. The Quest has a good sized library and seems to have saturated the market.
* Text is the bedrock of basically any content online and text is uniquely difficult to convey in a VR setting without being annoying. It either ends up just floating in space or you have to attach it to objects or you anchor it to a HUD, and a HUD has its own cavalcade of issues in VR around motion sickness. The most successful VR applications, paradoxically, involve the least text they can manage.
* In order to make things accessible to a wide market the applications have to be incredibly simple, to run well on bad hardware, which is uniquely difficult with a 3D space you have to render twice while maintaining high enough FPS to not give people motion sickness
* Most often any CTA in the environment would simply load a web browser, because you couldn't actually... like, buy a product in VR. You were redirected to an amazon listing or shopify website.
* And that's before you get to maintenance. Any intern can update a website. A VR space requires either a dedicated dev budget or accepting whatever janky building tools the platform ships with, which have never once been good enough to build anything actually worth visiting.
* Putting all that aside, there seems to be a substantial slice of humanity who just are not compatible with the tech. I myself enjoy it regularly, I had some issues with motion sickness early on, but toughing it out for awhile got me my "VR legs" as it were and it hasn't been an issue, but I've heard all kinds of things where people's physiology just rejects the headsets.
Overall I think it's just far better as a niche gaming thing and the only reason Facebook and others went so hard into the metaverse was to hopefully recreate the birth of the Internet, and to become landlords of a new digital frontier. And for that, fuck em.
It feels so silly expressing this, but the act of putting on a headset that completely engulfs my vision with screens, even if my space is already clear with a boundary, feels like a much bigger commitment than opening Steam. It doesn't matter if I'm standing for room scale or if I'm already seated with the headset next to me. Both cases feel like extra effort for a lesser experience.
The internet only succeeded because it was so free and open at the beginning, decentralized, open protocols, everything free, no borders, no censorship, no surveillance just hackers that layed the foundation with no restrictions placed upon them (except the severe technical limitations of the time for them to overcome). Of course that's almost all gone now with capitalism taking over turning everything to shit, but that came only after it already was successful.
Meta's vision and implementation of the metaverse was exactly the opposite end of the spectrum in every way from the start: centralized, commercial, proprietary, censored, surveilled, restricted, closed, walls everywhere, safe, advertiser friendly, it was uncool, not fun and no style. Like they paid people to create shitty "worlds" and force their employees to use it, otherwise nobody touched that shitshow willingly, except (concerningly) for some random toddlers for some reason.
Just see what Facebook did to BeatSabre and other VR games and Game studios they acquired.
Sure, they could have cloned it, but better with more money - that would be less questionable, especially if it actually worked out.
Well, at least they helped to provide affordable headsets for VRChat players at the right time. :)
You can never opt out of reality, so that dramatically reduces the value of a metaverse, and people don't ever actually want pretend reality.
If you are willing to relax the parameters to eliminate the full VR immersion and "rich presence" and other superficial nonsense that moron Execs want because they have no imagination and just think making Ready Player One will make them rich, then we've had the "Metaverse" since the 90s. It's the internet.
In terms of a digital space with user generated content, there have been tons. Some even successful. Meta had ample knowledge to draw from in the space, and should have been able to truly stand on the shoulders of giants.
Instead they chose to omit legs from their atrocious avatars and not give anyone any reason to use it over existing services.
Zuck is a moron that can't accept "You are a moron" as an answer.
I am so glad this product is failing/failed, and I find myself truly and existentially rooting for the glasses with the cameras to die a similar fate.
I have so many questions about the overarching product vision of Meta and can't help but think they're going to continue to struggle with everything that isn't "serve more relevant ads on Instagram."
Anecdote: my most vivid memory of their "VR vision" is virtual versions of Mark and another exec high-fiving in front of a flooded Puerto Rico. Classy.
> We’re introducing System Positional TimeWarp (SysPTW) from Depth-From-Stereo to Quest headsets. PTW uses real-time scene depth to reduce visual judder and lag when apps drop frames, making movement in VR smoother and more comfortable. [...] You can expect a more stable experience, especially in demanding social and gaming apps.
The "demanding social apps" they aren't naming here is almost certainly VRChat which is poorly optimized on the Quest.
That being said I still think VR will always be a niche thing. We had VR headsets decades ago, aimed at the kind of person who builds a full cockpit setup at home for playing extremely nerdy flight sims. Now things are amazing if you're one of those people but I dont see VR ever being truly popular.
The Steam Frame is a full PC that doesn't require a tether. I think it'll change everything if it doesn't cost a fortune (which it might). The possibilities for 3rd party hardware and the open ecosystem of a complete Linux distro + Steam are endless.
Day one of the Steam Frame I'm sure we're going to see all sorts of open source tools/scripts that make it better. Then 3rd party hardware will be announced and suddenly everyone's going to want one because all those things together make it sooooo nice.
When interacting with them I was left wondering whether they were delusional.
But the explanation is simpler: they were just lying through their teeth to empire build.
Can you believe they even built their own game engine to replace Unity? So may layers of principal engineers, directors, etc. I’m sure it will be cancelled if it hasn’t been already.
The immersive 3d stuff is "wizbang neat" to Zuckerberg and investors and gamers. But actually most "regular people" I know don't actually like being "in" such environments. Some people get dizzy and sick. Some people don't like dissociating from the "real" world like that, even for simple 3d games. Some people are visually disabled. Or just don't enjoy the modality.
But more than anything, no matter what, it's always awkward in its immersion and people's imaginations will always be far richer than the uncanny and limited simulated "3d" world that a computer can deliver. Even if you had 99% fidelity, it'll still be a poor simulacrum that often leaves you feeling poorer.
I think Zuckerberg completely misread what his own customer base / world audience wanted because of his own generational biases growing up with technical "lawnmower man" fantasies and fiction, and a misplaced philosophical bias where he believes transcendent, progressive technology leading inevitably in this direction. Because that's what the 1990s and early 2000s was pushing in gaming and other tech. Having billions of dollars at his disposal, and brought up to want and see this future, he saw it as both inevitable and something that he could be pushing the forefront of.
Yes people want to connect with other people in online social spaces. And I think they're probably very excited to do so in a manner which models the thing/place/object aspect of the "real world" rather than the glorified magazine / bulletin board which is Facebook. Especially if they can create and author and extend that world from within.
But I don't think they want to strap facehuggers to their face and do that in simulated three dimensions. And I don't think it's necessary to do the latter to get the former.
(But I'm biased, I've been trying to rebuild the magic I found in LambdaMOO in various forms ... for the last 30 years... https://timbran.org/moor.html )