In October 2021, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg despatched his trillion-dollar social media firm into a brand new route. Facebook changed its name 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 Facebook, the corporate, to rebrand into one thing else,” mentioned Leo Gebbie, principal analyst and director at CCS Insight. “The firm Facebook wished to clarify that it was extra than simply that one social web site.”
While the time period metaverse predates Facebook, Zuckerberg’s metaverse ambitions have existed inside Meta since 2014, when Facebook purchased digital actuality headset developer Oculus and launched Reality Labs. Seven years and a world pandemic later, world online game business income topped $193 billion. Meta — and Wall Street — noticed a chance to capitalize on an rising on-line inhabitants, driving in on a digital actuality headset wave.
“There was a little bit of a way in 2020 and into 2021 that this was a expertise that was prepared, that it was lastly going to hit the large time,” mentioned Gebbie. “We’ve had a whole lot of false dawns in digital actuality prior to now.”
In December 2021, Horizon Worlds launched in 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 monthly active users in Horizon Worlds by the top of the 12 months. But its long-term targets have been extra bold. In June 2022, Zuckerberg informed CNBC’s Jim Cramer that he anticipated one billion users by the end of the decade, doing “tons of of {dollars} of e-commerce every.”
The firm has a really lengthy approach to go.
An insider report published by The Wall Street Journal in 2022 discovered that Horizon Worlds had solely round 200,000 month-to-month energetic customers lower than a 12 months after launch. And now, three years later, the time period metaverse has largely disappeared from the general public dialog, with Google Trends noting a pointy fall in searches for the time period after 2022.
To make issues worse, Reality Labs is hemorrhaging money, racking up $58 billion in operating 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 right now? 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.
