What Meta's 300,000 Horizon Users Means for the Metaverse

The Verge's Alex Heath has a good scoop on Horizon Worlds which finally gives us a concrete number around its Metaverse efforts to date:

[Meta's] chief product officer, Chris Cox, gave employees a previously unreported update on Horizon’s user growth. He said that since Horizon Worlds was rolled out to all Quest users in the US and Canada in early December, its monthly user base has grown by a factor of 10x to 300,000 people, according to an employee who heard the remark. Meta spokesperson Joe Osborne confirmed the stat and said it included users of Horizon Worlds and Horizon Venues, a separate app for attending live events in VR that uses the same avatars and basic mechanics.

I confirmed with Alex on Twitter that he's referring to 300,000 monthly active users -- which as I also noted there, means that since last December, about as many people have tried Horizon Worlds/Venue as try out Second Life every month. In other words: Horizon usage is comparing well to... a 19 year old metaverse platform.  

Five other points worth keeping in mind about this milestone, the first I cannot emphasize enough:

Horizon's success or failure says little about the Metaverse concept itself.

I've seen frequent hot takes that Meta's recent slumping in the stock market suggests that the Metaverse concept itself is in jeopardy. So it's worth emphasizing that Meta is a very recent player to this space, and in terms of active users, is among the smallest. Again, there are at least half a billion active users in metaverse-type platforms. 

That's worth keeping in mind when I get to my next four points:

Horizon user activity is probably mostly concentrated in Venues, not Worlds.

User ratings are a pretty good reflection of an app's overall activity, and on that score, Venues (1,377 Ratings as of today) has much more of the usage, compared to Worlds (662 Ratings as of today) -- see screencaps above. My offhand guess is that the recent Foo Fighters concert in Venues after the Super Bowl alone counts for at least 100,000 of that 300K user number.

Only 3% of Quest 2's install base has tried Horizon Worlds even once.

With an install of about 12 million Quest 1 and Quest 2 HMDs on the market (and nearly 10 million units of Quest 2 sold), it's pretty striking how few owners have tried these two free apps.  

Which takes me to my next point:

"Monthly active" doesn't (yet) mean monthly recurring active users.

As any developer of free-to-play games can tell you, it's one thing to have someone download and launch your app once, and quite another to bring them back on a regular basis. It's why, for example, it doesn't mean all that much to Second Life's user base that some 300,000 new accounts are created every month, when about 99% of them never become active users.

The Quest/Quest 2 are used much more for Rec Room and VRChat.

Related to the Metaverse succeeding whatever happens to Horizon, metaverse platforms Rec Room and VRChat are far more popular among Quest users, contributing to quite decent total active monthly user bases between (I'd estimate) 3-5 million each. Even if Horizon totally fails, Meta will at least have helped create a platform of VR devices for these two already successful titles.

And finally:

Meta keeps making easily foreseeable and avoidable rookie mistakes with Horizon. 

To name just three (the first two featured in New World Notes):

• Virtual World Vet Warned Meta About Avatar Harassment In The Metaverse Years Ago -- But Long-Known Best Practices Were Not Prioritized
• Watch: Meta's Superbowl Ad Depressingly Promotes Its Metaverse To Lonely Middle Age People
• Meta Wouldn’t Tell Us How It Enforces Its Rules In VR, So We Ran A Test To Find Out (Buzzfeed)

Each of these disasters could have been avoided if Horizon was run by virtual world veterans who understand best practices going back over two decades. But notably, the head of Meta's metaverse efforts, Andrew Bosworth, has no prior experience in virtual worlds/game design.

Coming back to my first point: When it comes to the broader Metaverse ecosystem, Meta is like a group of kids from rich families who want want to become an indie rock band, buy the best gear, rent out the biggest venues, hire a network of top promoters, ignore their uncles' advice even though they were producers and roadies for Nirvana and Silversun Pickups, and when the audience results are mediocre, the Rolling Stone headline is somehow: Indie Rock Is Dead.

Yeah, no. Hopefully Meta addresses these issues and more, and we see that 300,000 MAU grow, but whatever happens says much about Meta, than Metaverse.

Comments

[Pathfinder]

Look at what's actually evolving in terms of what people *want* rather that what we *wish* they wanted. The Future Metaverse is really about having a completely self-sovereign account (identity, history, digital assets, etc.) that can be brought with you wherever you go. Not a bunch of Zuckerberg 3d avatars that hang out in virtual rooms together. Community and self-sovereign identity are the most valuable currencies of the new Metaverse. The network is more about loosely connected Discord servers, membership-gating NFTs and fashionable PFPs than anything Meta is imagining.

[Adeon Writer]

Honestly anyone who thinks people want NFT's to be part of the metaverse is so totally out of touch of the heartbeat of virtual worlds that it's scary.

[Martin K.]

Just to add to the list of rookie mistakes by Meta in social VR:

- Zuckerberg's tone-deaf VR tour of disaster-striken Puerto Rico: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/10/facebook-ceo-mark-zuckerberg-slammed-for-puerto-rico-vr-video.html

- Killing Oculus Rooms, Oculus Venues, and Facebook Spaces before Horizon was ready: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKjbJR2JYzM&t=205s

Remembering the fate of Oculus Rooms, Oculus Venues, and Facebook Spaces might help to predict the future of Horizon Workrooms, Horizon Venues, and Horizon Worlds: it's unlikely that all three will survive the next few years without major changes.

And it's easy to predict that whatever it is that Ready at Dawn is working on for Meta, it will surely look and feel better than the Horizon apps.

Also, I don't think that VRChat or Rec Room are already too big to be bought by Meta. (And both are facing serious challenges in the coming years: To which other platforms should they expand? How will they compete with events in Fortnite and with VR games in Roblox? How will they keep investors happy without joining the NFT and crypto hype?)

[TonyVT Skarredghost]

They shared this number to give people FOMO, but actually most experienced people did not fall for this trap

[RolandLegrand]

Maybe this got mentioned somewhere, but please realize that Horizon Worlds is not available yet in Meta's second largest market, Europe.

[Wagner James Au]

Yes that's definitely true! I believe Quest 1/Quest 2 install base in Europe is about 1 million - 1.5 million total, so will be interesting to see how much of the EU crowd will come in.