By Sam Boughedda
Facebook parent company Meta Platforms' (NASDAQ:META) transition into the metaverse isn't going to plan according to The Wall Street Journal, with internal documents said to show that the company is dealing with glitchy technology, uninterested users, and a lack of understanding of what is needed to succeed in the space.
The WSJ said in an article that Horizon Worlds, Meta's flagship offering for consumers, is falling short of performance expectations, with the company well below its initial target of 500,000 monthly active users by the end of 2022. The company was said to have revised its target to 280,000 in recent weeks, but they are still only at less than 200,000, the publication said.
In addition, returning users are said to be low, with most not returning after the first month, while the user base has steadily declined since the spring.
The article claims that a variety of Horizon's virtual spaces are "mostly barren of users."
Meta has previously acknowledged that it will take years for the transition to occur, with the Oculus headsets usually used for a short period of time before being stashed away. A Meta spokesperson was said to have told the WSJ that the metaverse was always intended to be a multi-year project.
According to the internal documents, just 9% of the worlds created are ever visited by at least 50 people, while most are never visited at all.