Meta’s Horizon puttering as Consumers Reportedly Don’t Return

Meta is having some trouble selling its metaverse concept, facing headwinds including glitches, uninterested users and not much clarity on what it will take to succeed, The Wall Street Journal reported.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg has cautioned that patience will be needed — the transition could take years, he said. But this comes as Horizon Worlds, the company’s flagship offering for the metaverse, is falling short of internal performance expectations. Meta had a goal of reaching 500,000 monthly active users, but recently downgraded that to 280,000 — and the current amount is less than 200,000.

This comes with many Horizon users not returning to the app after the first month, with the user base steadily declined since the spring, according to documents seen by WSJ.

And Meta’s social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, attract over 3.5 billion active users per month between all three of them, coming out to a number almost half the world’s population. Horizon, meanwhile, is reaching less than the population of Sioux Falls, SD, WSJ wrote.

Horizon’s services include a number of interactive virtual spaces or worlds letting users do things like shop, party and work.

But internal statistics have shown that only 9% of worlds creators built have more than 50 visitors — and many are never visited at all.

PYMNTS wrote recently that Zuckerberg’s goals of being “metaverse first, not Facebook first” has gotten some criticism over the past year since he changed the company name. That included a virtual reality version of himself with what critics said were “soulless eyes” and 90s-era graphics.

Read more: Zuckerberg’s Unlovable Metaverse Shares Flaws of Meta’s Payments Policy

And on Oct. 7, there was a leaked memo from the company showing that the Horizon Worlds Metaverse Lite had a variety of bugs and stability issues making it so even employees didn’t use it.

“If we don’t love it, how can we expect our users to love it?” Vishal Shah, Meta’s metaverse vice president, said.