Meta to become a Metaverse Company
Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, sketched a vision of a utopian future many years off in which billions of people would inhabit immersive digital environments, working from home, socializing and playing games inside virtual and augmented worlds.
Meta has spent billions of dollars and assigned thousands of employees to make Mr. Zuckerberg’s dream feasible. The company’s flagship virtual-reality game, Horizon Worlds, remains buggy and unpopular, leading Meta to put in place a “quality lockdown” for the rest of the year while it retools the app.
Some Meta employees have complained about frequent strategy shifts that seem tied to Mr. Zuckerberg’s whims rather than a cohesive plan. Also, Meta executives have butted heads over the company’s metaverse strategy. One senior leader has complained that the amount of money the company had spent on unproven projects has made him sick to his stomach.
Meta's struggle to reshape the business was described in interviews with more than a dozen current and former Meta employees and internal communications obtained by The New York Times. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about internal matters.
Mr. Zuckerberg successfully overhauled his company a decade ago, getting it to focus on how its products worked on smartphones instead of desktops. He signaled a similar shift last year, saying that "investing in the metaverse would allow Meta to make the leap from one technological era to the next."
There are some signs that Meta’s bet has put it ahead of competitors. The company’s consumer V.R. headset, the Quest 2, is the most popular V.R. headset on the market right now, with around 15 million sold. Its Oculus V.R. app — which has since been rebranded Meta Quest — has been installed over 21 million times on iOS and Android devices, according to an estimate by Sensor Tower, an app analytics firm. But Meta’s future success depends on the company’s ability to bring virtual and augmented reality tools to far more people.
In February, Meta said that its Horizon Worlds game had grown to roughly 300,000 monthly active users — an increase from a few months earlier, but minuscule in comparison with Facebook’s more than 2.9 billion monthly active users. The company declined to provide more up-to-date figures for Horizon Worlds.
The chief executive recently went on Joe Rogan’s podcast, where he told the popular comedian that building an immersive metaverse was his “holy grail.”