> And the failure isn't Zuckerberg's alone. Microsoft, Apple, and a good many others all crashed into the same wall.
This is revisionary. Mark Zuckerberg's Meta was the only company to go all-in on the "metaverse". Microsoft has barely even dabbled in an adjacent area with the Hololens.
Apple has essentially zero exposure to anything like the "metaverse". Apple's Spatial Computing and its use of Personas and SharePlay is not like the "metaverse", despite the comparison between Meta's and Apple's efforts being perhaps inevitable.
The metaverse, as Meta pursued it, was a social media virtual reality space, and only one of the three companies you mention touted and offered a product for users in this space.
The goal is to replace displays and interactions by something new, more immersive, spatial and relying on movements rather than mechanical buttons.
And in my opinion they all failed for the same reasons, and it is on the input side.
The idea of a metaverse as a new internet was a way to capture was was seen an an inevitable evolution, but in the grand scheme of things, this is almost anecdotal.
Still, the rename to Meta was a cynical ploy regardless
Anecdotal but my parents know about Meta, because they use FB/Messenger daily. They have no idea what Alphabet is.
Don't they? I have to remind myself that it's actually called Meta, I always call it facebook.
Debatable.
Well, I think of that more being due to their mismanagement with the whole WMR ecosystem. "Sterile corporate VR meeting rooms" sounds like exactly something that would have been from Microsoft rather than Facebook, but they tried too hard in some aspects (a half dozen companies making nearly-identical-but-not-really headsets! support built into the OS so deep that to remove it they had to brick everyone's headsets!) and not at all in others.
This is revisionist, Microsoft has been tilting at the same windmill for a long time too.
They even created and subsequently removed their own native platform for Windows, used by many hardware vendors, whose products were bricked by the Windows update that removed the feature.
I love my WMR headset, but Microsoft wasn't really pushing hard for the kinds of "social" experiences Meta was trying to get us to participate in.
holy revisionism batman. It's literally right in https://www.apple.com/apple-vision-pro/. Half the page is "you can watch movies in 3D", the other half is "you can be next to people". They rewrote the visual appearance of all their OSes to match liquid glass on the Vision Pro. Their goggles display your eyes because they expected you to wear them so long it would make it feel more natural to the plebs around you not wearing them and not joining you enjoying spatial sound. Half their ad copy is about "making it feel like you're working next to people".
Apple went all in onto the whole Metaverse crap. They paid off just about every major tech reviewer, tech influencer and even tech bros with following on Twitter (and here, too) with "early access programs" to the Vision Pro. At least can give them kind of the benefit of the doubt because they somewhat quickly saw that it was a dead end.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2022/10/14/mark-zucke...
> During the most talked-about segment of the show, Zuckerberg proudly announced that legs were coming the metaverse, which sounds bizarre out of context (and kind of in-context), but it’s the solution to many years of Meta VR avatars being nothing but floating torsos. He and another Meta worker showed off their new legs by kicking and jumping, and Zuckerberg talked a little bit about legs and why it’s taken so long to get them.
> “I know you’ve been waiting for this. Everyone has been waiting for this,” said Zuckerberg. “But seriously, legs are hard, which is why other virtual reality systems don’t have them either.”
> But it turns out the legs that were shown off with all that kicking and jumping were fake. That was not actually Mark jumping, the sequence was pre-rendered for the show.
I've always been blown away by the fact that they didn't more fully pursue VR gaming. I think they could have found a more enthusiastic audience.
I feel like the main possible benefits that these digital spaces bring, for consumers, are kinda the opposite of things that any Big Corporate Entity would ever want to be involved in.
Not only because of hardware costs, but not everybody can play them for extended periods of time and 'the youth' are increasingly preferring to look at social media over playing games.
It's probably already far more popular than the 3DTV of the 2010s.
- VR sickness
- Lack of physical space in people's homes
- Don't really work as a shared experience without multiple headsets
On top of that, this company in particular is Facebook. Nobody likes Facebook.
I hope it's something we can figure out how to propagate despite the seemingly limited interest. I suspect anyone who liked playing quake arena games would love this game if they are not susceptible to motion sickness.
I recently started exploring how to port open source shooters (red eclipse, warsow, nexuiz) to the platform and realized there are several considerations that make games designed for VR special that a pure port wouldn't hit.
I bet plenty of gamers haven't bought their first headset yet despite being interested.
It's still an unfocused mess.
The bigger issue is, VR will ALWAYS be a niche thing. Always on AR glasses are the real future bet, not a niche industry.
VR will never be as big as Facebook / Instagram / WhatsApp. It just doesn't make sense to invest so much into it. Not sure what Zuck doesn't see this?
Meta could of been the hardware leader of a thriving ecosystem, but instead they tried to replicate the walled garden of app stores that are failing in 2026.
Glassholes are the future?
VR headsets are at least fun. These glasses though, seem really dumb. I doubt they will ever be ubiquitous. I certainly wouldn't be caught dead wearing a surveillance device made by Facebook of all companies.
Apparently they sold 7 million of these things according to the latest report, so at least some people like them(or the idea of them).
I used to work at meta, I was in one of the many research teams that were upstream of horizon.
The Failure was pretty much entirely Zuck's fault, in the same way that when a ship smashes into rocks, its the captain's responsibility.
The first big problem is that there was never a clear definition of what "the metaverse" was mean to be. It was a pivot that kinda appear after orion (the AR glasses that were supposed to ship in 2020 Q3) failed to ship.
A small team had made a VR clone of roblox, where you could make your own games in VR. It was low poly and stuttery on the Quest. Another team was working on getting hand interaction into the quest. A third team thought "hmm, we have a avatar system, what if we can type on keyboards? could we have meetings"
The meeting system and the roblox clone carried on, vaguely separately. Then Zuck saw them and decided that they needed 500 more engineers each. Time passed, progress wasn't fast enough, so more engineers were smeared in.
Then the meta rebrand, and then the whole weird everything smashed together branding.
All the while more engineers were being piled in, most of them had no experience in 3d, let alone games.
But, that would have been fine if someone at the top had been steering, making joined up product decisions, Advocating for the users. carmack sorta tried, but a) he wasn't the easiest to work with and B) Boz thought he knew better
TLDR: Zuck can't product for shit. He thought that shipping disjointed features would make a platform. It didn't. He also thought that dumping 11,000 people into an org, most of which have no experience of games, VR, 3d or graphics would lead to a good outcome.
He never could. That's why he just buys everything.
But he could have tried the VRChat folks, and Bigscreen. I guess he bought the Beat Saber folks, but he probably needed to buy a big game studio and maybe one with experience shipping successful MMORPGs.
Thats why codec avatars received so much money, despite being lead by a perfectionist who was both incredibly stubborn and also surprisingly sloppy.
https://www.meta.com/en-gb/experiences/eleven-table-tennis/1...
The while time I've owned a Quest, I've never felt the need or desire to launch the Horizon App.
So yes.
Zuck seriously seems to have no clue how to do anything. His entire existence is stealing other people's stuff
Otherwise, look up WSJ reporting on the subject and reddit.
Rumors of future products are never super-reliable, but point to their ambitions being downscaled at best. Really, everyone expects them to pivot to smart glasses, because that's what they clearly wanted to make all along, and there's probably a market for smart glasses in a way there isn't for... whatever the AVP was supposed to be.
The rolled it out like a cheesy corporate team-building mandatory exercise, not something where anyone would want to actually spend any time by choice.
Specifically this part: "Don't post generated comments or AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans."
No one invested that much money into nothing for so long
Look trying out nft and co with your marketing budget yeah for sure, building stuff for a poc but spending that many billions for so long without any results that's just crazy.
Like a college who 'invested' into 3d printing. It feels like just because Zuckerberg was able to do so and in his brain everything has to be billions (come on he will not spend his time on a million dollar project) made this thing going for so long
Delusional I would say
But my take is that, given the efforts of other big player in the same field (Hololens, VisionPro, the VR stuff from Valve, Sony, Samsung, etc.) at least one of them would have gained traction and the entire field would have followed behind.
I think the vision was wrong.
The entire VR/AR industry sort of crumpled up and died while metaverse was still burning a billion dollars a day.
I worked in a VR startup at the time. Nobody could find a customer and all the competing startups slowly bled to death (including mine). Everyone was really holding their breath that Apple Vision would bring some life back to the industry, but once it became clear that it was a flop, everyone gave up.
First one was I think during the releae of the first Oculus, when still hardly anyone got to actually try out VR headsets. An absolutely HUGE area in one of the main halls, the queue going once around the entire area, many hours of waiting time, etc.
Second visit was two years later, in the "indies, hobbyists and everything else hall" - staffers of some Chinese gaming startup were stopping random passersbys and essentially pleading for them to try their VR game - the headset of course being technically superior than the Oculus during the first visit...
The Metaverse was not something that Meta was good at, they went about it all wrong and it was doomed to fail.
• The metaverse was never inevitable: Horizon Worlds peaked at 300k MAUs, cratered below 1k DAUs, and is now shutting down. Meta burned $73B building ghost towns; the real survivors (Beat Saber: $255M revenue, VRChat: 150k+ concurrent) succeeded by giving users embodied activities and emotional hooks, not empty virtual offices.
• Hardware wasn’t the problem: Quest 3 is cheap, comfortable, and capable. The comprehensive crash happened because giants chased AAA ports and productivity tools while ignoring what actually retains users: presence + community + meaning.
• Management-school case study, updated: The $70B lesson isn’t “VR died.” It’s that corporate metaverse bets failed exactly where indies and niches thrived.
Full breakdown of what works (and why the giants missed it) here: https://linernotesxr.substack.com/p/what-works-in-vr-lessons...
If a big company embraced an open platform I suspect the space would be far successful. Still a lot of untapped potential.
VRChat is successful because someone can show up in a Goku avatar and start roleplaying. A DJ can stream their twitch steam right into an instance.
VRChat still has no real store system having people upload unity projects manually to use a custom avatar. There's an entire universe of potential revenue if a clothing, avatar, and instance space system was built into the client.
In that regard the long term practice of the artists and users of their creations (mainly avatars) transacting directly via Booth or Gumroad can be seen as healthier & more robust long term.
I was surprised though that one of them changed the name of their entire company.
Ever since the "power glove" and that 1st lauding of "VR" in the 90's, I've been bullish. People don't want that shit on their heads (I keep shouting). If you want to argue that people want immersion, I'll suggest they also want immersion that they can instantly look away from.
As a VR enthusiast, I beg to differ. Anyone who had spent a lot of time in the space knew that this was largely a hardware problem.
You need a lightweight, see-through head mounted display. It needs to be aware of local lighting conditions and does more than just room mapping, which means it needs a lot of compute power. It needs to have eye tracking (for minor perceptual angle drawing, at least), a high resolution (or light field) display. It needs to stay cool, and have a 6+ hour battery life (which is one working session). Oh, and people don't like any tethers. Or controllers. Which means extremely accurate hand tracking and integration with a keyboard/mouse. Price doesn't matter, as much as people think. AVP costs less today than a mid tier powerbook 25 years ago. But that also needs to come down.
Apple Vision Pro is the first VR/AR headset to come close, by the way. And even that is very far off. In fact, I'd blame that more for this shutdown than anything single other thing: it demonstrated that Meta's hardware labs were so fundamentally off for what they were trying to achieve that it basically rendered their entire investment useless.
TBH, people who don't use VR probably think it inevitable due to all the ads, marketing, and especially movies' romanticized of the virtual world. People who actually bought a headset and put it on their faces know this shit will never become mainstream in the current form factor.
I'm not sure I have ever witnessed such a comprehensive industrial failure in the software world. There were some discussions about Facebook's ability to pull it off, but not that long ago, many still saw the "metaverse" vision as inevitable; a clear trajectory for the future of the internet.
And the failure isn't Zuckerberg's alone. Microsoft, Apple, and a good many others all crashed into the same wall.