In October 2021, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg took his multi-trillion dollar social media company in a new direction. Facebook changes its name to Meta Zuckerberg has set his sights on a new horizon, the virtual universe.
“There was a real need and desire at the time to rebrand into something else,” said Leo Gebbie, principal analyst and director at CCS Insight. “Facebook wanted to make it clear that it was more than just a social networking site.”
Although the term “metaverse” predates Facebook, Zuckerberg’s metaverse ambitions have been growing since 2014 when Facebook acquired virtual reality headset developer Oculus and Launch of Reality Lab. Seven years after the global pandemic, global video game industry revenue reaches peak $193 billion. Meta and Wall Street see an opportunity to capitalize on the growing online population with the wave of virtual reality headsets.
“There’s a feeling going into 2020 and 2021 that this technology is ready and it’s finally going to take off,” Gebbie said. “We’ve had a lot of false dawns in virtual reality in the past.”
December 2021, Horizon World launches in the US And marks Meta’s entry into the open world virtual reality platform space. Meta’s short-term goals are 500,000 monthly active users It will appear in Horizon World at the end of the year. But its long-term goals are more ambitious. In June 2022, Zuckerberg told CNBC’s Jim Cramer that he expected the number of users to reach 1 billion by the end of the century, each doing “hundreds of dollars of e-commerce.”
The company still has a long way to go.
an insider report Published by The Wall Street Journal In 2022, we found that Horizon Worlds had only around 200,000 monthly active users less than a year after launch. Now, three years later, the term “Metaverse” has largely disappeared from public conversation, Google Trends Noticed a sharp drop in searches for the term after 2022.
To make matters worse, Reality Labs is bleeding cash, with operating losses reaching $58 billion since 2020. However, the company has had some success in the augmented reality space through its partnership with Ray-Ban’s AR glasses.
Meta did not respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
What happened to the Metaverse? What exactly is the Metaverse? So where is Meta today? Watch the video to learn more.
— CNBC’s Jonathan Vanian contributed to this report.
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