Mark Zuckerberg can't even get his employees to play his buggy Metaverse game

Remember Horizon Worlds? No, don’t worry, you’ve not missed the announcement of a new game starring Aloy. No, this is Meta’s online VR game, and home to that incredibly cursed virtual selfie which Mark Zuckerberg posted in August. The Eiffel Tower truly never looked so beautiful.

The game allows users to create legless avatars and hang out in virtual spaces. So kind of like Roblox, I guess? Anyway, it’s gained quite a reputation for its terrible-looking visuals, and as reported by The Verge, a lot of Meta employees have apparently been avoiding using it, too.

Take a look at the trailer for Horizon Worlds right here.

Vishal Shah the VP of Metaverse for Meta, apparently addressed a number of problems with the game in a memo obtained by The Verge, citing its bugs and stability issues. “Currently feedback from our creators, users, playtesters, and many of us on the team is that the aggregate weight of papercuts, stability issues, and bugs is making it too hard for our community to experience the magic of Horizon,” he reportedly said in a memo.

Apparently, he went on to say that one major issue with the development of Horizon Worlds is that many employees who are developing it just don’t seem to be using it that much themselves. “For many of us, we don’t spend that much time in Horizon and our dogfooding dashboards show this pretty clearly,” Shah allegedly wrote. “Why is that? Why don’t we love the product we’ve built so much that we use it all the time? The simple truth is, if we don’t love it, how can we expect our users to love it?”

In another memo (also obtained by The Verge), Shah reportedly doubled down on this sentiment, adding that a plan was being put in place to “hold managers accountable” for making their teams use the game once a week, at the very least. “Everyone in this [organisation] should make it their mission to fall in love with Horizon Worlds. You can’t do that without using it,” he allegedly said. “Get in there. [Organise] times to do it with your colleagues or friends, in both internal builds but also the public build so you can interact with our community.”

Meta spokesperson Ashley Zandy told The Verge that Meta is “confident that the metaverse is the future of computing”, and added that they are “always making quality improvements and acting on the feedback from our community of creators”.