
Originally published on my Patreon
After writing about Meta’s highly misguided $50 million bounty for developers to create content in Horizon Worlds, a former software engineer at Horizon Worlds reached out to me. They had read my latest book, where I devote a chapter to Meta’s many missteps in trying to build the Metaverse.
But this engineer had even more surprising details to share.
By request, I’m keeping their breakdown anonymous, but it rings true to everything other Meta employees past and present have told me, both on the record and off. For good measure, I also just gut checked it with two other developers who have recently quit working on Horizon Worlds. (Meta itself has declined to respond officially to my many requests for comment, beginning in 2023, after my book interview with Zuckerberg fell through.) And at least one of them believe Horizon Worlds can still be saved -- read their solution at the end.
It's an important story to share. For one thing, it helps explain why Horizon Worlds is floundering, with far less active users than Second Life (now 21 years old), let alone VRChat and Rec Room, which are far more popular on Meta’s own Quest headset. Despite billions spent in development and marketing, including a literal Super Bowl ad, Horizon Worlds has roughly 300,000 users, versus Second Life's 500,000.
For another, it helps explain why the Metaverse "failed" in the general public's eye, since most people assume Meta was the leading developer of the technology.
I’ve always believed the fundamental problem is that Meta leadership never truly understood the Metaverse, and simply treated it like a 3D version of Facebook. In interviews for the book, it also became clear to me that most of the people working on Horizon Worlds weren’t themselves experienced or passionate about virtual worlds.
Indeed, in 2022, Meta leadership sent out an internal memo requiring employees to dogfood Horizon Worlds more (i.e. actually play it).
It was actually worse than that, this ex-developer tells me. Required to dogfood their own virtual world, the engineer tells me, many Meta staffers automated their dogfooding:
Metaverse Platforms Need to Appeal Beyond Their Core Player Community, or Face Slow Death (Comment of the Week)
Good points by "EmptyEyes", reflecting on how algorithms tend to homogenize metaverse platforms:
This connects nicely with the recent conversation around advertising Second Life. It's a mistake to create a marketing strategy based on what only seems to be the most popular activity in SL -- social fashion roleplay -- when that ignores the many multiple niches of other communities creating content that has a proven existing market. For instance:
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Posted on Monday, March 24, 2025 at 02:29 PM in Comment of the Week, Making the Metaverse | Permalink | Comments (0)
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