New World Notes

What Went Wrong With Horizon Worlds? Former Meta Devs Share Surprising Insights -- And a Solution to Still Save It

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:

New on My Patreon: An Ex-Meta Dev Shares Inside Details on What Went Wrong With Horizon Worlds

Why is Horizon Worlds floundering, with far less active users than Second Life, let alone VRChat and Rec Room, which are far more popular on Meta’s own Quest headset? 

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. 

Join my Patreon for free to read it all here.  

Meta's Horizon Worlds $50M Creator Fund Yet Another Deep Misunderstanding of How Metaverse Platforms Work

I promised myself I'd stop picking on Meta after last month's "Make Horizon Worlds succeed or get fired" debacle*, but this latest announcement is too painful to keep quiet about:

Meta has made some strides on content by attracting more and more creators to build for the platform and creating some of its own first-party games inside of Horizon Worlds.

Now the company is making another big bet to incentivize creators to build on Horizon Worlds; today it announced a $50 million ‘Creator Fund’ that will pay out to creators of worlds that drive high visits and retention.

If you're an indie developer or studio who needs the work, you should definitely consider applying, but this fund is basically Meta's open admission that Horizon World as a metaverse platform is fundamentally not fun.

Historically, successful metaverse platforms like Rec Room, VRChat, etc. are rich with amazing content created by the user communities themselves which they create for free because they enjoy the very process of creating and enjoying them together as an end in itself.

Paying third parties to create this content not only does not make the underlying platform any more fun, but it will inevitably lead to content that's not optimized for highly social, casual play, where metaverse platforms thrive. I just blogged one such example from VRChat, a community-created volleyball game, again made for free by the users themselves.

All of this is why one of my golden rules for metaverse development is the creation process should be fun and rewarding in itself, and that the platform should not be monetized immediately. You want a large and highly active community on there before thinking about that. Which Horizon Worlds is decidedly not.

Or as Richard Bartle explains it: 

What Will Virtual World Economies Do With Image-to-3D Mesh Conversion AI Programs Coming Soon?

Tim Hannan, an indie creator who's been doing some interesting experiments blending Second Life video/images with gen AI (as here), recently sent me these two fairly alarming -- but actually not that surprising -- images. 

The image on the left is the photo of high end basketball shoe. The image on the right is the same shoe in Second Life.

In this case, I do mean "same", in the sense that the virtual shoe shares the underlying digital substrate as the RL shoe, so to speak. While it's possible to recreate the shoe in Blender by hand, the modeling was done by an algorithm which first ingested and then extrapolated the 2D image itself to output it into a 3D version.  

"There is now a free open source [AI] model for image to 3D mesh that can be run locally," Tim tells me. "Just a quick sample I don’t know crap about 3D modeling etc." To do this, he uses an all-in-one AI program with a plug-in for the 3D conversion. "Give it an image it returns a .gilb (?) file, then I just load it in Blender, [then] convert to .DAE for Second Life."

This does not mean, I should quickly add, than an avatar right now can just come along and wear this virtual version of the shoe. It would first need to be rigged to the SL skeleton and optimized with the various mesh bodies. For SL fashion merchants, this technology might still be useful for prototype/showcase purposes. (I.E. "Hey fam, do you want a shoe like this in SL?")

For creators like Tim, who might use the shoe (or anything else that can be so modeled) as a non-interactive prop in his machinima, it's good enough to use right now:

Whatever Became of Blueberry in Second Life? Read the Story Only on My Patreon

I recently saw someone on social media wondering whatever became of Blueberry in Second Life, and in case you missed it, I told that in-depth, highly personal story of Blueberry / KiwiCo creator Gizem Mishi Akin on my Patreon a few months ago. I continue to be grateful Gizem was so willing to share so much about herself in it. And for that very reason, the story will probably be one of those stories that will only be available on my Patreon, at least for the near future. So I hope you consider joining for free to read it all here.

Grand Theft Auto VI Becoming Grand Theft Metaverse Like My Book Predicted? I'm Checking on Early Reports

A story from Digiday has been flying all over the Internet since yesterday, because it basically suggests the long-awaited Grand Theft Auto VI will be more like Grand Theft Metaverse:

Rockstar Games has been in discussions with top Roblox and Fortnite creators, as well as dedicated “GTA” content creators, about the potential to create custom experiences inside the upcoming game, according to three industry insiders with knowledge of these meetings, who requested anonymity in order to protect business relationships. These experiences would allow creators to modify the game’s environment and assets to bring their own intellectual property — and potentially their brand sponsors — into “GTA’s” virtual sandbox.

Representatives of Rockstar Games did not respond to requests for comment prior to the publication of this article.

I've reached out to multiple Roblox and Fortnite creative studios to try and confirm this report myself, and will let you know what I learn (if anything). Meantime, I have to make a small victory lap, since this was more or less one of the future forecasts of metaverse evolution from my book in late 2023:

While Horizon Worlds Layoffs Loom at Meta, Metaverse Platforms Rec Room & VRChat Are Hiring Many Roles

Meta is now laying off thousands of employees while all but announcing that staff working on Meta's Horizon Worlds is next on the chopping block this year. So it's important to note that Rec Room and VRChat -- two metaverse platforms which have ironically thrived on Meta's own Quest platform -- are currently hiring:

Rec Room job openings:

• Machine Learning Engineer
• Product Data Scientist
• Senior Product Data Scientist
• Engineering Gameplay Engineer, Retention
• Principal Product Manager | Discovery

VRChat job openings (selected):

• Senior Data Scientist, Product Analytics
• Staff/Principal Designer
• Senior Server Engineer - Experience
• Senior Manager, Trust & Safety
• Director of Product, New Audiences

All remote roles, too! That they're hiring is not a surprise, since VRChat has (by their own reporting) 10 million active users, while Rec Room (by my estimate) has well over 20 million users. What is somewhat surprising is that neither company was acquired by Meta, seeing that much or most of that user base -- nearly 70%, in VRChat's case -- use a Meta Quest headset. But oh well.

In VRChat's case, by the way, I know several staffers were deeply involved in Second Life back in the day, while the founders are very much aware of the platform. Also, I recently chatted with a VRC staffer who got their start as a community developer, and shared some about the VRChat corporate culture and advice on getting hired:

Meta's CTO Memo Was an Early Signal of Company Shifting Away from VR/Quest Toward AR & AI (Comment of the Week)

With news breaking that Meta is now laying off thousands of employees to focus on its AI products, this comment from reader Martin K last Thursday sure seem sadly prophetic:

Since Quest headsets and Horizon Worlds cannot succeed on the scale of Meta's ambitions (and certainly not in 2025), I'm reading [Meta CTO's internal memo] as a preparation for a major shift of focus away from mixed reality and Horizon Worlds towards augmented reality +AI glasses (at the end of this year or in 2026). (And I'm sure that Meta will find a way to describe this new focus as an evolution of their vision of the Metaverse. Maybe the new/true/real Metaverse or whatever. They'll come up with something.)

If this shift of focus towards AR glasses and AI is already planned, why not just announce it? I assume the purpose of this whole exercise (and its predictable outcome) is to rationalize the scaling down of the MR and Horizon Worlds teams, prevent or shut down internal discussions about this change, and give some employees a chance to leave or switch teams before they are fired.

But I'm biased because Meta's VR strategy never made much sense to me. Thus, I guess, I'll just wait, watch, and limit my engagement with the Quest platform.

"Despite the reductions," MSN reports, "Meta still has around 1,000 job openings in California, with hiring efforts focused on AI and other business-critical roles." So, yes, I agree with Martin that limiting engagement with the Quest is probably a good idea. 

As for my original rant about Bosworth's memo, there's a pretty good conversation on it on LinkedIn, where it went mini-viral.

Meta Leadership Warns Staff to Start Succeeding Or Else On Its Long, Foreseeably Misguided Metaverse Strategy

Here we go with another "leaked" Meta/Reality Labs memo from CTO / Zuckerberg right-hand-man Andrew Bosworth, though unlike last week's happy jazz hands, this one has a more dire angle:

2025: The Year of Greatness

... We need to drive sales, retention, and engagement across the board but especially in MR. And Horizon Worlds on mobile absolutely has to break out for our long term plans to have a chance. If you don't feel the weight of history on you then you aren't paying attention. This year likely determines whether this entire effort will go down as the work of visionaries or a legendary misadventure...

You don't need big teams to do great work. In fact, it may make it harder. One trend I've observed the last couple of years is that our smaller teams often go faster and achieve better results than our more generously funded teams. Not only that, they are much happier! In small teams there is no risk of falling into bad habits like design by committee.

You can read the whole thing below (via Business Insider's Jyoti Mann) but my strong interpretation to all this wording is:

Start strongly boosting our metaverse KPIs or get fired this year.

... because the only time the leaders of a large company talk about the value of small teams is when a huge staff is about to become a tinier one. Also, I've personally heard multiple insiders talk about a coming cut, recently -- and have been hearing about Reality Labs' "design by committee" problem since roughly 2019. 

It's tragic that Meta's staff is now bearing the brunt of the very fundamental mistakes that Zuckerberg and Bosworth themselves made over the last 10 years -- especially when these were foreseeable errors at the time.

To highlight just a few I've followed closely:

Zuckerberg/Bosworth spent billions to mass market VR, without researching (or knowing) why VR tends to make females literally vomit:

[Microsoft's] danah boyd is not an obscure researcher, but frequently cited in mainstream media and tech news sites. So when she ended her 2014 essay with a call for researchers across Silicon Valley to follow up on her initial findings, I assumed this would immediately happen.

It did not.

Reached while writing Making a Metaverse That Matters, she told me that few if any VR industry members contacted her after the essay was published. Neither did they even follow up with her in 2017, when a study published in Experimental Brain Research found that when women volunteers played a game in an Oculus VR headset, 78 percent of them experienced nausea. “To my knowledge,” she told me, “[Oculus and Meta] did not pursue any of those research questions.”

Over the years, I’ve asked several senior Meta staffers about this, [including Zuckerberg/Bosworth's PR team] and have received no adequate reply.

Read more here.

Zuckerberg/Bosworth did not follow the advice of former Facebook VP / Second Life co-founder Cory Ondrejka, Jim Purbrick, and other virtual world veterans they hired.

If you've been following the news about Facebook/Meta's metaverse project lately, you'll recall the slew of bad press when a female user was sexually assaulted in Horizon Worlds, leading the company to hastily add an avatar "boundary" system...

"I was literally banging the drum at Oculus Connect two years in a row," Jim Purbrick tells me, with evident frustration, even sending along the talk he gave on the subject at Facebook's own conference back in 2016. "I also told every new Oculus employee I met to read My Tiny Life in addition to Ready Player One, but the message didn't reach every part of the organization, sadly."

Read more here, and, of course, on Ondrejka in great detail, in my book.

Zuckerberg/Bosworth did not clearly define the Metaverse, or explain their conception to their own employees.

According to a survey conducted last month by Blind, the popular anonymous messaging app for company staff, confidence in the Metaverse and Meta's efforts dropped sharply last year [2022]. That's compared to a November 2021 Blind survey where the very same questions were asked:

To the statement, "I believe Meta will successfully build the metaverse" (above), only 50% of employees answered yes. In November 2021, 77% of staff answered in the affirmative... 56% say their own CEO has not explained the metaverse clearly.

Read more here.

Or, you know, read Snow Crash, which defines the Metaverse with biblical specificity.  

In a funny irony, Bosworth pinged me on Twitter when I pointed out that Meta seemed to be walking away from the Metaverse... in a statement he wrote that actually shows little knowledge about the concept. The painful irony is his own employees will now have to labor under the gun of that misapprehension.

Anyway, read his whole statement below.

As Linden Lab Launches Its 1st Major Ad Campaign for Second Life in Years, Read My Interview With Philip Rosedale & Brad Oberwager on Marketing & Designing a Whole New User SL Experience

Linden Lab just started publishing new ads on YouTube for Second Life, one of which you watch here. ("It represents one variation of many that are being tested", the company tells me.) Screengrabs of it throughout this post.

It's part of a new and aggressive marketing campaign for Second Life -- basically the first one in nearly 4 years.

To get more context and strategy, read my latest interview with Linden Lab head Brad Oberwager and CTO Philip Rosedale below!

Inside Project Zero: Brad Oberwager & Philip Rosedale on Marketing & Designing a New User Second Life Experience

Part of a 3 part series on my Patreon; read Part 1 here; read Part 2 here

Project Zero is not simply a cloud streaming option for existing SL users. It's tightly integrated into an aggressive marketing plan with a growing budget, and a completely revised first-time experience that discards the "Welcome Island" model that's basically existed since 2003.

In my recent conversation with Linden Lab heads Brad Oberwager and Philip Rosedale, we explore their vision for growing the user base with Project Zero -- and why the company is re-starting external marketing of SL for "the first time in four years".

Yes, you read that right. In the nearly four years since Oberwager took over leadership of Linden Lab, the company hasn't much marketed Second Life:

BRAD OBERWAGER: [Y]ou know the adage, “I know half my marketing is wasted, I just don’t know which half.” When I came in, I asked [Linden staff], and they didn't know. Turns out it was 100% wasted. 

So since I couldn't figure it out, I turned off all the marketing and it didn't have an impact on revenue or any of the financials, other than we weren't spending the money on marketing.

But it stopped, obviously, it stopped bringing people in. It's just that the marketing wasn't bringing people in that were converting into dollars. So we kept it [off] until we had an ROI we could prove out. 

And it took us a lot longer. I figured it was going to be six months to turn marketing back on. It went a lot longer. 

Now, with Project Zero and with different partnerships we have now, the ROI makes sense for money in the marketing. So starting small, $1,000 a day, it's going to go up fast. 

So today [late December 2024] was the first day that we've spent a dollar on marketing in three years, nine months. And this is going to be great for all the creators, all the communities. We're going to start driving people back in only where we know where we're driving them, and we have different partnerships with different community bases, to start sending people not to just where we want them, but we're testing sending them to other places. We're going to test with Project Zero. 

So come midway through the first quarter [of 2025], we should be on a much higher run rate for marketing than we've ever had before. It makes good sense for everybody. We're going to drive more revenue to the creators. The way our whole model is set up, we do well when other people do well; we are not able to monetize if other people in our world are not doing well. We don't really sell anything directly to anybody other than land, and even that, you only buy land from us if you're getting the benefit of it…

Next: Redoing the old first-time user experience, and partnering with MadPea games.