With Mark Zuckerberg announcing that Facebook has plans to become a Metaverse company, regular readers might ask, "Wait, weren't they already building a Metaverse?"
I'm talking of course about Facebook Horizon, released in closed beta last September, optimized to run with the Oculus Quest 2 HMD that was also released about that time. However, it has since seemingly fallen below, well, the horizon.
A Facebook veteran with deep knowledge of Horizon tells me the project might be revived, but faces some corporate barriers inherent to the company:
"I think Facebook has the money and people to throw at the problem," as they put it to me, "but making 0-1 products as a large entity hasn't been one of Facebook's strong suits... it's been to acquire other products and integrate them into the Facebook ecosystem. With the average employee tenure being 2 years or so, and the need to expand teams at rapid rates, it's very difficult to make decisions and stick to a single vision because things are always changing."
Consequently, they go on, the Horizon team has been jumping haphazardly to the latest hot feature or platform:
"This [turnover] leads to teams at Facebook fast following on trends. You can see it when you look at Horizon and Rec Room, or when you listen to Instagram's new focus on video, referencing Tik Tok. So will they achieve the vision [Zuckerberg] paints? Maybe. But will it be executed in a way people choose it over say, Animal Crossing, or whatever new social game comes out? To be decided."
Meantime, new leaders have been coming onto the Horizon project with new ideas to be prioritized, or the development team would be tasked with re-doing a feature made years beforehand.
This is all somewhat surprising to me. Zuckerberg has publicly expressed his desire to build Metaverse-like technology at least back during the acquisition of Oculus Rift nearly a decade ago, and his company is brain-meltingly profitable. Yet somehow, they can't keep a team focused on a singular vision?
Then again, there's other companies with way less baggage trying to build a Metaverse too:
"[P]eople really just want that pay and glory," as this insider tells me. "When they realize it’s actually a hassle but good pay they go do other things if they are in demand. VR work is paid the highest in tech so people flock to it, but what they don’t realize is that they’re working on a currently isolating, limited tech, that you have to wear on your face, and they’re working for a company that they aren’t super proud to say they work at."
This is just one person's perspective, to be sure, but it very well might explain the lack of Horizon news. In any case, game industry vet Jason Rubin just announced plans to help lead Facebook's Metaverse team, so we might start to see some renewed development focus on the horizon. (See what I did there?) Also read this UploadVR breakdown of Facebook's Metaverse plans, in which Horizon is only a small part in the larger whole.
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