The Metaverse: Hype, Reality, and Future Prospects

Meta's ambitious metaverse vision faces skepticism as user interest wanes and practical applications remain unclear.

### The Rise and Fall of the Metaverse: Meta's Ambitious Journey
* 🌐 The metaverse emerged as a concept during COVID isolation, fueled by **virtual reality advancements** and significant investments from major companies like Facebook, which rebranded to **Meta** in 2021.
* 🏦 Citibank projected the metaverse could reach a **staggering $13 trillion valuation** by 2030, prompting banks to establish virtual branches and celebrities to buy digital properties.
* 🎮 Despite the early hype, including Meta's launch of Horizon Worlds, the metaverse has struggled to attract users, with only **200,000 monthly active users** reported, far below Meta's goal of **500,000**.
* 📉 As interest waned, Reality Labs faced **$58 billion in operating losses**, and Google searches for "metaverse" have stagnated since their peak in late 2021, indicating a **decline in public enthusiasm**.
* 🔍 The challenge remains in defining the metaverse, which has existed in various forms since the early 2000s, yet **no solid use case has emerged to drive widespread adoption**.
* 📉 Web3 metaverses like Decentraland and Sandbox also experienced significant drops in activity, with Sandbox reporting **fewer than 100 daily active users** in early 2024.
* 💸 Despite losses, Meta continues to invest in the hardware and software ecosystem of the metaverse, aiming to **control user data and in-game advertising** within this evolving digital landscape.
* 🔮 Looking ahead, while the metaverse's future remains uncertain, Meta's long-term ambitions may still bear fruit, potentially **redefining the next generation of computing** over the next decade.

Turning towards the metaverse, talking ad nauseam about the metaverse, there's been a lot of snark about what exactly the metaverse is. The metaverse, a byproduct of COVID isolation, mass-produced virtual reality headsets in the burgeoning Web3 space.

If we think back a couple of years, we have huge companies investing in metaverse divisions and hiring chief metaverse officers, and whole strategies around it. Banks started opening branches in the metaverse.

Celebrities made headlines buying property in the metaverse. ETFs around the metaverse trade started popping up. We were all still sort of under pandemic lockdown, so there was over-exuberance in the metaverse because people were

looking to socialize, and it wasn't that easy to do in real life. At the peak of the metaverse hype cycle, Citibank estimated the space could hit $13 trillion in valuation by 2030. Microsoft threw its hat in the metaverse ring. Even Web

3 and crypto projects capitalized on the trend with decentralized metaverses like Decentraland and The Sandbox. People would take this sort of idea of a digital asset, apply that to the 3D virtual worlds, and voila, you got the metaverse.

But when it comes to the metaverse, no one stakes their claim on the space more than Facebook. Facebook is announcing its name change officially now, changing its corporate name to Meta. The next platform and medium will be even more immersive and

embodied internet where you're in the experience, not just looking at it. In October of 2021, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg placed his trillion-dollar social media company at the forefront of the metaverse conversation, investing heavily in its Reality Labs segment, kicking off the entire hype cycle.

There was genuinely a need and a desire at the time for Facebook, the company, to rebrand into something else. Metaverse was Facebook's answer to an increasingly online population, with Zuckerberg estimating a billion users by the end of the decade. So that leads us to ask,

where is everybody? If you build it, they will come. I think we're all still waiting to see if people will come to understand the metaverse and Meta's role in the space. First, we have to figure out what exactly it is.

The metaverse cannot be defined. Kind of like a virtual, digital world, universe, if you will, in which people can essentially have, like, their internet counterpart—essentially, like an avatar of yourself—live inside this virtual world, an

open-ended, interconnected world with user-driven content and the potential for users to cross into other platforms. Trying to define what a metaverse, or the metaverse is, was kind of one of the biggest issues that actually surrounded the

metaverse overall as a concept, because it was never really universally agreed upon. Well, it's Narrator: difficult to nail down an exact definition of a metaverse. The term predates Meta and virtual reality headsets. Online platforms like Second Life came about in the

2000s and are considered early examples of metaverses, virtual spaces where players could assume digital identities and interact with other players from around the globe, originating primarily from the video game space. More recent examples of metaverses include multiplayer games like Fortnite and Roblox,

even Blizzard's World of Warcraft could be defined as a metaverse.  Fortnite and Roblox are, essentially, 2D versions of a metaverse; immersive, open-world platforms.

So, if the metaverse has already existed, why did the term gain popularity in 2021? Well, a lot of it has to do with advancements in virtual reality. If you're talking to a CTO of a big Fortune 500 company

and trying to discuss technology trends needing attention, VR and the metaverse checked all the boxes. There was a sense in 2020 and into 2021 that this was

a technology that was ready, that it was finally going to hit the big time. Because, I mean, we've had a lot of false dawns in virtual reality in the past. There have been many times when people have said, "Oh, this technology is only a year or two

away from being the next big thing," and that is where Reality Labs played a huge role for Meta, created in 2014 after its acquisition of VR startup Oculus. Meta started ramping up investment in Reality Labs over

the past five years. In December of 2021, two months after changing its name, Meta officially launched its online multiplayer virtual reality game, Horizon Worlds. You know, by the end of the decade, we hope to basically

get to around a billion people in the metaverse doing hundreds of dollars of commerce. A goal that is looking less and less achievable, I think, at the moment, as when the pictures came out of Mark Zuckerberg's avatar in Horizon Worlds a

couple of years ago, and it's this incredibly low-quality avatar. And people are like, "This is what we're supposed to be getting excited about? This is what you're saying is the future?" Who would want to go into this space?

The problem with metaverses is that people assumed they would be developed instantaneously, and even Facebook/Meta, trying to do it in an environment where they're a publicly traded company and have to show success on a quarterly basis, was even too fast for a company as well-funded as Meta was.

Now, three years after changing its name, Meta's metaverse has largely fallen out of the tech conversation. Google searches for the term "Metaverse" are near flat, just three years after hitting a peak in October of 2021. Undoubtedly, the last couple of years we've seen the

metaverse hugely drop in popularity. Now, Reality Labs faces an eye-watering $58 billion in operating losses since 2020, and insider reports from 2022 revealed Horizon Worlds was averaging around 200,000 monthly

active users in its first year,
less than half of Meta's original goal of 500,000. If it didn't do this,
and it decided just to be a social company, which it
absolutely could have done, it would have saved it billions of
dollars in terms of what it

spent on Reality Labs. So, Narrator: what happened? Why
didn't people flock to the metaverse? Well, there's been a
lot of finger-pointing, but most arguments come back to the same
conclusion. No one's really

figured out a solid use case for
the broad adoption of a metaverse. The audience wasn't
necessarily there at the time, and so, hence, I think you see
that sort of pullback away from it. Meta pitched the
metaverse as a place to both

work and play. Companies could
host virtual meetings; you could socialize with friends and
play games.  Horizon Worlds, shopping, and e-commerce were
also part of that early vision, promising all these
amazing experiences like *Ready Player One*. You know, that it
could be a wider difference than

what we're actually seeing when
we get into the device. To put it simply, people really
didn't care. Video game players had their own metaverses
already, and the metaverse hype cycle ended up being, well, a
lot of hype. And it wasn't just

Meta who felt the metaverse
bubble pop. Web3 metaverses like Decentraland and
Sandbox saw trading activity fall significantly on their sites
after 2022. Sandbox's unique active wallets, a way to measure
daily active users on the

The platform fell below 100 in early 2024, meaning less than 100 people were active on the platform day to day. 98% of those projects are totally dead today; the other 2% have lost, you know, 95% of their market cap.

Since the highs of 2021, Wall Street has been pulling back too, with several Metaverse ETFs closing up shop over the past two years. We continue to hope that somebody's going to figure out a killer use case for VR, and even Apple has struggled to do so.

So I don't think a Metaverse, anytime soon, using hardware that's readily available now, is going to be happening. So why keep investing in something that is an obvious cash burn? Well, when it comes to metas, the Metaverse, this isn't...

the metaverse. This *is* the metaverse, or at least it's a piece of it. The metaverse—it's this broad thing. It's not just virtual and augmented reality, although those are going to be some of the new major computing platforms when it comes

to defining its own metaverse. Meta says Horizon Worlds isn't the entire metaverse. It's only part of the larger, interconnected Metaverse ecosystem that includes software like Horizon Worlds and the Horizon operating system, as

well as wearables like Oculus VR headsets and Meta's newest edition, its Orion AR glasses. We've been investing in this for a long time, just because we are asking the questions about what comes after the smartphone. It's what many consider to be Meta's end game—a

a foothold in the hardware space, a space that has previously eluded them. So, playing a long game with the hope that it pays off, and the hope being it gives Meta that platform, the computing platform that they crave; the place where they can set the

rules. They don't have to abide by the rules of gatekeepers like Apple or Google. They get to have their own walls, their own building, and have their own developer ecosystem within this new computing paradigm. Meta's Oculus headsets are the top-selling virtual

reality headsets in the world, capturing 60% of the VR headset marketplace. Still, that's holding space in a seemingly declining market, as US sales of all VR and AR headsets dropped 40% in 2023 compared to the year prior. Meta did not respond to

CNBC requests for comment. Not very many companies have the luxury of having, you know, an enormous amount of cash, and having an incredibly powerful advertising business that provides them with a constant stream of money to be doing these investments. I

meet people every day who think Mark Zuckerberg invented VR, which is just a crazy notion. It is true that Meta can get its own hardware into people's hands, cutting out the middlemen of Apple and Google. Earlier this year, Mark Zuckerberg sat down with the

hosts of Acquired to discuss this exact topic, saying Meta controlling its destiny is strategically valuable.  I think we might be like, twice as profitable if we own the platform or something. So I think from that perspective, that's worth a lot, just from a purely

dollars perspective, which is not primarily how I come at this stuff. Meta was trying to become the company that was building the hard part of the metaverse, which was figuring out the hardware. It's expensive, losing a lot of money doing it, but it's a bet

that they're willing to take and controlling the hardware and software ecosystem also means access to two extremely profitable spaces that Meta is intimately familiar with: user data and in-game advertising. Advertising has grown by about 10% a year over

the last several years, and it's a roughly $140 billion industry today.  Meta's ad ambitions are much more grand than just saying, "Here's a new helmet to put on your character and dress up your avatar with."  Where, you know, coordinated Roblox are more kind

of on that tier where Meta is trying to do what they're doing with Facebook advertising. And, you know, they're trying to run the ecosystem.  All goes according to plan, you would have a big online economy going through these metaverses in the future. Metaverses, both the

physical with AR to the virtual world and, you know, full 3D VR. That's where augmented reality comes into play, an arena big tech is investing heavily in. Again, here's Mark Zuckerberg speaking with the Acquired podcast on his vision

for AR. Everyone had phones before, replaced them with smartphones, and then a lot more people got smartphones. If all we get is all the people in the world who upgrade their glasses to glasses that have AI in them, then, like, this is already

going to be one of the most successful products in the history of the world. So, and I think it's going to go a lot further than that. Traditionally, we've thought about the metaverse, or a lot of

people thought about the metaverse as specifically a 3D world and virtual reality. But, you know, Meta has really made it a point to be, oh, AR, augmented reality blended into the physical world. Is a really important play. That's

an incredibly powerful thing, if Meta is able to catch that position as a platform player for the next generation of computing, which is, I think, the real ambition here that puts it in a totally different position to where it's been

functioning so far. So maybe we haven't seen the end of Meta's metaverse ambitions. Maybe the metaverse didn't go anywhere. It could just be another decade before we see the ultimate plans of Reality Labs come to fruition.

It's absolutely been, it's been easy to tease Meta and to kind of, you know, point the finger and maybe critique the investments, and that's been a challenge for the company, but I really think it's inarguable that, if not the net

of the category, Mark, I mean, it may not still be really even alive and kicking.

Why Facebook-Parent Meta Is Willing To Lose Billions On The Metaverse

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CNBC

Initial Metaverse Hype and Facebook's Rebranding

Initial confusion and skepticism surrounding the metaverse's definition.

Significant early investments by major companies in metaverse initiatives.

Increased metaverse interest fueled by pandemic lockdowns and social isolation.

High valuation projections and involvement of tech giants like Microsoft.

Facebook's rebranding to Meta and its significant investment in Reality Labs.

Questioning the lack of widespread user adoption despite Meta's efforts.

Defining the Metaverse and its Precursors

Difficulty in defining the metaverse; described as a virtual world with user-driven content.

Early examples of metaverses predating Meta and VR headsets, such as Second Life.

Modern examples including multiplayer games like Fortnite, Roblox, and World of Warcraft.

Increased popularity in 2021 attributed to advancements in virtual reality technology.

Meta's Horizon Worlds and the Decline of Metaverse Hype

Launch of Horizon Worlds and ambitious user and commerce goals.

Negative reaction to the low quality of Zuckerberg's avatar in Horizon Worlds.

Assumption of instantaneous metaverse development and the challenges faced by Meta.

Significant drop in metaverse popularity and Reality Labs' substantial operating losses.

Low user engagement in Horizon Worlds, falling far short of initial projections.

Reasons for Metaverse Failure and Lack of Use Cases

Lack of a clear, broadly appealing use case for the metaverse.

Meta's vision of the metaverse encompassing work and play, but failing to capture users.

Decline in popularity not limited to Meta; other Web3 metaverses also experienced significant drops.

Extremely low daily active users on platforms like Sandbox.

Withdrawal of investment from Wall Street, with several Metaverse ETFs closing.

Meta's Long-Term Vision and Hardware Focus

Meta's perspective that Horizon Worlds is just one part of a larger metaverse ecosystem.

Meta's long-term strategy for a foothold in the hardware space, aiming for a new computing platform.

Meta's Oculus headsets maintain market leadership in a declining VR/AR market.

Meta's financial capacity to sustain long-term investments despite losses.

Zuckerberg's perspective on the strategic value of controlling the platform.

Meta's investment in hardware as a means to control the software ecosystem.

Access to profitable areas: user data and in-game advertising.

Meta's ambition to control the online economy within metaverses.

Focus on both virtual (VR) and augmented reality (AR) metaverses.

Zuckerberg's vision for AR glasses as a potentially highly successful product.

Meta's emphasis on AR's integration with the physical world.

Meta's ambition to become a platform player for the next generation of computing.

Possibility of a longer timeline for Meta's metaverse plans to come to fruition.

Acknowledging criticism of Meta's investments but highlighting the potential long-term impact.