Member-only story
The air was thick with excitement last week as Meta/Facebook/MakeMyNudesFight.com announced that they had “10x’d” those using their social VR platform Horizon to a whopping 300,000 monthly active users. I can’t even write “this may seem high” because it does not seem high at all, and in fact is an alarmingly low number of users for a company that spent billions in R&D on the metaverse. In three months — despite there being 7 million Oculus units sold — they have somehow managed to convert less than 10% of a customer base that does not have a dramatic amount of stuff to play with. Friend of the newsletter Cullen also did some maths, and realized that Facebook has spent more than the base trim on a Toyota Camry per monthly active user:
As my followers have also added, these numbers are incredibly bad — Beat Saber, albeit a game that has been around longer than three months, has 4 million copies sold along with 40 million songs. Gaming company Valve’s VR headset Index had over 3.5 million active users at one point, and they are a significantly smaller company than Facebook (which isn’t to say they’re small, per se). Perhaps it’s the captive market of gamers they have? Who knows.
In any case, the whole metaverse conversation that Mark Zuckerberg has succeeded in creating is almost entirely…
