Meta’s goal of having 500,000 monthly active Horizon Worlds users by the end of the year has been cut to 280,000, according to documents from within the company.
Horizon Worlds, Meta’s virtual reality (VR) social universe, is having trouble getting and keeping users. According to internal documents that the Wall Street Journal was able to get a hold of, Horizon Worlds has about 200,000 monthly active users. This is less than the 300,000 users that Meta confirmed it had hit in February.
Users of Horizon Worlds can make or go to places where they can hang out, play games, meet new people, and talk with friends. The number of people using the platform increased by ten times after it became available to all Quest users in the US and Canada last December. The popularity of Meta’s Quest 2 headset during last year’s holiday shopping season may have also helped.
But now it looks like Meta is changing what it thought would happen. The WSJ says that Meta’s new goal for Horizon Worlds is to have 280,000 monthly active users by the end of this year. This is down from the original goal of 500,000. The company said it had about 10,000 different worlds as of February, but the WSJ says that only about 9 percent of these virtual places are visited by more than 50 people, and most people don’t use the platform again after a month.
A spokesperson for Meta told the WSJ that the company’s plans for the metaverse will take several years and that the company is always making improvements. The Verge’s request for comment was answered right away by Meta.
Alex Heath of The Verge wrote earlier this month that the Horizon Worlds team is dealing with a number of quality problems with the platform. Vishal Shah, VP of metaverse at Meta, said in a memo that the team is going on a “quality lockdown” until the end of 2022 to stop adding new features and fix bugs in the platform.
“Our creators, users, playtesters, and many of us on the team have told us that papercuts, stability difficulties, and bugs are making it too difficult for our community to experience the enchantment of Horizon,” Shah wrote to staff. He also wanted to know why the personnel didn’t make more use of the system themselves. A new bug-reporting mechanism for Horizon Worlds was published later by Meta. The company even confessed in a blog post that the app was “unstable” during a recent competition.
At the company’s Connect event on Tuesday, Meta showed off the $1,499 Quest Pro VR headset for companies that want to work together in VR. Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, also said that avatars in Horizon Worlds will soon have legs. He showed what this might look like during the presentation. It’s still not clear if they’ll look like that when they come to Horizon Worlds. A spokesperson for Meta told UploadVR editor Ian Hamilton that this is just a “preview of what’s to come” and that the demo didn’t even happen in live VR.
