Zuckerberg's expensive Metaverse filled with 'sad' empty worlds

Horizon Worlds, AKA Meta’s VR version of Roblox or Club Penguin, really hasn't seemed to take off. It was recently reported that even the employees working on the game haven’t been playing it enough - allegedly, a plan was being implemented to “hold managers accountable” for making their teams use it once a week, at the very least.

In a memo sent to employees, Meta’s VP of Metaverse, Vishal Shah, allegedly told staff: “Everyone in this [organisation] should make it their mission to fall in love with Horizon Worlds. You can’t do that without using it. 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.”

Take a look at the trailer for Horizon Worlds below.

Well, if the people working on it apparently can’t be convinced to play, it’s perhaps unsurprising that the general public haven’t been enthralled, either. As reported by Kotaku (and originally covered by The Wall Street Journal), internal stats have illustrated that hardly anyone continues playing beyond their first month, and the result is a ghost town of empty worlds. To put it into perspective, WSJ writes that only 9% of user-generated worlds are visited by more than 50 players - the remainder are rarely visited by anyone but their own creators, who tend to be left staring at their barren kingdoms like lonely gods. One document cited by WSJ apparently said: “An empty world is a sad world.”

Initially, Meta had apparently hoped that Horizon Worlds would have 500,000 active monthly users, but that goal has now been adjusted to 200,000, which says a lot. It’s worth keeping in mind that this new player research was apparently based on a sample size of just 514 people, but reportedly, this was due to how few players there are in the first place. The player base was described as “small and precious”, which is a more optimistic way of putting it, I guess.