Zuckerberg’s Metaverse Struggling to Attract Users, Leaked Documents Show

In this illustration photo taken in Los Angeles on Oct. 28, 2021, a person watches on a smartphone Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveil the META logo. Chris Delmas/AFP via Getty Images

Mark Zuckerberg’s ambitious, multi-billion-dollar Metaverse platform is yet to garner the same traction as existing platforms Facebook and Instagram, according to internal documents.

The tech giant’s metaverse offering, Horizon Worlds, is falling short of expectations, with parent company Meta adjusting internal monthly user targets from 500,000 to 280,000.

The current tally, according to the documents obtained by the Wall Street Journal, stands at 200,000—far short of the 3.6 billion active users on either Facebook, Instagram, or WhatsApp.

The internal documents also revealed that many visitors to Horizon Worlds were dropping off after the first month, and only nine percent of the worlds within the platform had been visited by at least 50 people.

Horizon Worlds is a free virtual reality videogame supposed to give users a chance to interact and engage with other individuals in an online world built from the ground up.

The game is part of the Metaverse being built by Zuckerberg’s Meta, which has been touted as an opportunity for the tech giant to claw back the valuable youth audience it is losing to platforms like Chinese-backed TikTok.

However, Metaverse has been criticised for its quality issues—like its graphics—and seemingly no point-of-difference compared to earlier online worlds like Second Life.

Other competing metaverse platforms have also reported similar difficulties in attracting regular users.

Data-tracking firm DappRadar, found that the Ethereum-based virtual world Decentraland supposedly had only 38 users over a 24-hour period, while its competitor, The Sandbox, only had 522.

The Sandbox Metaverse courtesy of The Sandbox

The report compelled Decentraland to respond, saying there was “misinformation” on the number of active users.

“Some websites are tracking only specific smart contract transactions but reporting them as daily active users ... which is inaccurate,” the company wrote on Twitter.

A Big Hurdle to Climb

Prof. Barney Tan at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) has expressed scepticism at whether Zuckerberg’s Metaverse can reach the sophisticated scale it needs to keep users online.

“Its prospects of success depend on how many complementary service providers, co-developers, and users they are able to attract into its eco-system because Meta cannot do everything on its own,” he previously told The Epoch Times in an email.

“It is certainly helpful that it is a company as big as Meta spearheading the move into the Metaverse, but at the same time, Meta does not have the best of reputation among tech firms.”

There have also been questions over the positive or negative impact of a wide-scale Metaverse engaging millions of people, with experts pointing to already prevalent problems such as online bullying and addiction—an “opium for the masses.”

General view of the Metaverse Fashion Week on March 25, 2022, in Unspecified. Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images

Jason Miller, the founder of the social media app Gettr, shared a similar assessment.

“It seems to be a computerised extension of identity politics,” he previously told The Epoch Times. “‘Hey, I’m going to live online and have this different person or version of who I am. By the way, ‘I can go and buy things when I’m online to make my online person cooler and different.’”

“It’s not real life, and I think there’s a certain point where you start getting into transhumanism and all kinds of weirdo stuff. It’s not that big of a leap,” he said.