In October 2021, Fb CEO Mark Zuckerberg despatched his trillion-dollar social media firm into a brand new path. Fb modified its title to Meta and Zuckerberg set his sights on a brand new horizon, the metaverse.
“There was genuinely a necessity and a need on the time for Fb, the corporate, to rebrand into one thing else,” mentioned Leo Gebbie, principal analyst and director at CCS Perception. “The corporate Fb wished to clarify that it was extra than simply that one social web site.”
Whereas the time period metaverse predates Fb, Zuckerberg’s metaverse ambitions have existed inside Meta since 2014, when Fb purchased digital actuality headset developer Oculus and launched Actuality Labs. Seven years and a world pandemic later, world online game business income topped $193 billion. Meta — and Wall Road — noticed a chance to capitalize on an growing on-line inhabitants, using in on a digital actuality headset wave.
“There was a little bit of a way in 2020 and into 2021 that this was a know-how that was prepared, that it was lastly going to hit the massive time,” mentioned Gebbie. “We have had lots of false dawns in digital actuality prior to now.”
In December 2021, Horizon Worlds launched within the U.S. and marked Meta’s entrance into the open-world digital actuality platform area. Meta had a short-term aim of 500,000 month-to-month lively customers in Horizon Worlds by the top of the yr. However its long-term objectives have been extra bold. In June 2022, Zuckerberg instructed CNBC’s Jim Cramer that he anticipated one billion customers by the top of the last decade, doing “a whole bunch of {dollars} of e-commerce every.”
The corporate has a really lengthy strategy to go.
An insider report printed by The Wall Road Journal in 2022 discovered that Horizon Worlds had solely round 200,000 month-to-month lively customers lower than a yr after launch. And now, three years later, the time period metaverse has largely disappeared from the general public dialog, with Google Traits noting a pointy fall in searches for the time period after 2022.
To make issues worse, Actuality Labs is hemorrhaging money, racking up $58 billion in working losses since 2020.
Meta did not reply to CNBC’s request for remark.
What occurred to the metaverse? What precisely is the metaverse? And the place is Meta immediately? Watch the video to be taught extra.
CORRECTION: A earlier model of this text incorrectly recognized Meta’s Ray-Ban partnership glasses as augmented actuality glasses. The glasses are good glasses, not augmented actuality.
— CNBC’s Jonathan Vanian contributed to this report.
