Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is such a big believer in the idea of the metaverse that he changed the name of his company to Meta. However, a leaked internal memo suggests that few of the developers inside the company are as enthused as he is. Vishal Shah, Meta’s VP of Metaverse says in the memo that even the people developing the company’s flagship metaverse product, Horizon Worlds, aren’t using it. The reason? It’s just not very good.
Anyone who keeps up with Meta’s quest to build the metaverse will have to feign surprise here. Even people who don’t have a Quest headset have gotten a preview of the current state of Horizon Worlds, thanks to Zuckerberg himself. This summer, Zuckerberg was trying to celebrate the arrival of Horizon Worlds in France and Spain by posting a screenshot from the app (see above), but it only served to remind everyone how bad Horizon Worlds looks. Zuckerberg followed up by promising visual enhancements to the experience, but the problems may run deeper than that.
In Shah’s Sept. 15 memo, he concedes that Horizon Worlds has “quality gaps and performance issues,” and he wants the team to spend the rest of the year on a “quality lockdown.” The main issue, according to the leaked memo obtained by The Verge, is that Meta’s developers aren’t using it very much. If the people building the metaverse don’t want to use it, it’s unlikely consumers will go out of their way to explore Meta’s new pet project.
Even Meta’s developers don’t care much for the product they’re building.
This was not just a one-off rant by Meta’s lead metaverse executive. Shah followed up with another memo on Sept. 30 that called out specific issues and how he wants to address them. He noted the onboarding experience is confusing and frustrating for users and that Horizon Worlds still has not found a “market fit.” This is a sentiment I’ve heard from other people working on metaverse technology. While there’s a roadmap for hardware, no one knows what sort of experiences are going to work (if there even are any). Shah says a plan is being developed that will “hold managers accountable” to ensure their teams are using Horizon Worlds at least weekly.
Meta has thrown billions of dollars at the metaverse based almost entirely on CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s certainty that it’s the future of the internet. The company is also reportedly planning layoffs due to mounting metaverse losses and falling Facebook usage. If Meta can’t get its employees to care about Horizon Worlds, what chance does Zuckerberg’s next metaverse play have?
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