Watch This Video And Tell Me Meta’s Metaverse Has A Future

If there was a sea change moment for Meta over the past few months, it was probably Mark Zuckerberg posting a single metaverse selfie with his expressionless avatar and clip art images of world landmarks behind him. The image went viral, and caused Meta to go on the defensive talking about future improvements to its main metaverse, Horizon Worlds.

But all we have is the present and what actually exists on Meta’s platform at the moment. And I’ve just watched another video that should dry up any lingering confidence that whatever Mark Zuckerberg is building here is actually the future. Meta Horizon posted this tweet this week about an “event” happening inside the Metaverse in which an unseen Godzilla has stepped on…a Wendy’s. In the Wendyverse.

UPDATE: Meta Horizon has now deleted the tweet and video without explanation. Here is a YouTube video showing what the experience looks like:

A “once in a lifetime experience” indeed.

Where do you even start with this? As ever, Horizon Worlds continues to look, aesthetically, just absolutely atrocious, with textureless, featureless avatars and landscapes that look like bad Roblox levels. Despite Mark Zuckerberg’s future promises of legs, avatars are still floating around like demented ghosts, though I guess Godzilla at least has legs if he was able to step on a Wendy’s.

And I’m sorry, what, this event is…Godzilla stepping on a Wendy’s? Meta has already started going after brand deal and crossovers before its universe is even really established. If this is the game’s idea of an “event,” it’s no wonder why Horizon Worlds has actually lost 100,000 players this year instead of coming anywhere close to reaching Meta’s growth goals for it.

In contrast, here’s a “mech versus monster” live event that Fortnite had in its map three years ago:

No, it’s not in virtual reality, but no one cared about that. It was a cool event to watch through your digital avatar, and Fortnite does something like this practically every 3-6 months, in addition to having tens of millions of active players. It’s already more of a metaverse than Meta can ever hope to create, no matter how many billions get thrown into its black hole.

There are only so many times you can say we are in the “early stages” of the metaverse before you realize that at the very least, this Zuckerberg-specific VR version is going nowhere. It’s already been many, many years and visuals feel like they’ve barely improved here, and the ongoing quest for legs appears to be never-ending. These worlds are ugly and lifeless and this, a giant Godzilla footprint in a virtual Wendy’s, is their idea of fun and a “once in a lifetime experience,” said completely without irony. How can anyone have any faith that the billions of dollars being thrown at this thing every quarter are ever going to produce something that’s either A) widely adopted or B) remotely profitable? There is no path here. Not without waiting 10, 20 years for enormous leaps and bounds in the tech, and I don’t think Meta investors will have that much patience. I certainly wouldn’t.

Update (11/19): As I posted earlier in the piece, Meta was actually so embarrassed about the Godzilla Wendy’s event it actually deleted the tweet in question featuring the original video. In turn, that deleted it from this article so it looked like there wasn’t a video at all. Not cool Meta!

But again, you can still see the event from the video from a Meta user above, and I’m not sure what it says about your world when one of the only things you’ve decided to promote all month about your platform (Meta Horizon has only two total tweets in all of November now) is something you are forced to delete because it’s getting dunked on too severely. I actually only saw this clip in the first place because of Kevin Roose, New York Times technology columnist, tweeting it with the caption “this is bleak.” My own tweet about it got probably 10x the engagement of Meta’s own, and even though sure, it’s a rival platform, it strikes me as pretty weird that Facebook’s main metaverse hub has a paltry 18.9K Twitter followers. Any big post it has is viral for a bad reason, like its “whose excited about legs??” one that has a ratio of 7,500 quote tweets to 6,000 likes:

Meta’s goal for Horizon Worlds was 500,000 players by the end of the year. Last we checked, it had fallen from 300,000 at the start of the year to 200,000, and it seems unlikely anything has increased it since then. While Horizon Worlds is not the only aspect of Meta’s VR ecosystem, it is supposed to be the main metaverse hub, but it remains a wasteland of empty spaces and poorly executed ideas like Gozilla stepping on a Wendy’s. I do not believe it’s just a matter of time until Meta figures out how to make Horizon Worlds and engaging place for the broader population. I do not believe that will ever happen at all. And where does that leave their metaverse ambitions?

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.