Last October, when Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company would change its name to Meta and become a “Metaverse company,” he sketched a vision of a utopian future many years away in which billions of people would be immersed. Digital environment for hours to work, socialize and play games inside virtual and augmented worlds.
Since that year, Meta has spent billions of dollars and hired thousands of employees to make Mr. Zuckerberg’s dream come true. But Meta’s Metaverse efforts have had a rocky start.
The company’s flagship virtual-reality game, Horizon Worlds, remains buggy and unpopular, prompting Meta to keep a “quality lockdown” for the rest of the year while it revamps the app.
Some META employees have complained about frequent strategy changes that seem tied to Mr. Zuckerberg’s whims rather than a cohesive plan.
And Meta executives have bowed to the company’s Metaverse strategy, with a senior leader complaining that the amount of money the company spent on unproven projects made it “sick to my stomach.”
The company’s struggle to reshape the business was described in interviews with more than a dozen current and former META employees and in internal communications obtained by The New York Times. The people spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about internal matters.
On Tuesday, Meta is expected to unveil a new VR headset at a developer conference, along with other new Metaverse features. The stakes are high for the company, which is rushing to replace itself with declines in other parts of its business. TikTok is turning young users away from Facebook and Instagram, two of Meta’s big money-makers, and Apple has made privacy changes to its mobile operating system, costing Meta billions of dollars in advertising revenue.
The company’s stock price has fallen nearly 60 percent over the past year — a reflection not only of broader market turbulence, but also of some investors’ suspicions that the metaverse will soon be overly attractive. In late September, the company announced that it would be halting most hiring, and Mr Zuckerberg warned employees that layoffs could be coming.
“Meta’s business in 2022 is facing intense, significant and Metaverse-related pressures that Mr. Zuckerberg has sought,” said Matthew Ball, an investor and Metaverse expert. Whatever he has told is true, except that time is far beyond his imagination.”
What is the metaverse, and why does it matter?
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Original. The term “metaverse” describes a fully realized digital world that exists beyond the world in which we live. It was coined by Neil Stephenson in his 1992 novel “Snow Crash”, and the concept was further explored by Ernest Cline in his novel “Ready Player One”.
Future. Many in tech believe that the metaverse will usher in an era in which our virtual lives will play as important a role as our physical realities. Some experts warn that it may still be a fad or even dangerous.
Meta spokesman Andy Stone said in a statement that the company believes it is still on the right track.
“It’s easy to be cynical about new and innovative technology,” said Mr. Stone. “It’s really hard to build this but that’s what we’re doing because we believe the metaverse is the future of computing.”
Mr. Zuckerberg successfully transitioned his company a decade ago to focus on how his products worked on smartphones rather than desktops. He hinted at a similar change last year, saying that investing in the Metaverse would allow Meta to leap from one technological era to the next.
There is some indication that Meta’s bet has put it ahead of its competitors. According to external estimates, the company’s consumer VR headset, the Quest 2, is the most popular VR headset in the market, with sales of over 15 million. Its Oculus VR app — which has been rebranded Meta Quest — has been installed more than 21 million times on iOS and Android devices, according to app analytics firm Sensor Tower estimates.
But Meta’s future success depends on the company’s ability to bring virtual and augmented reality tools to more people.
Meta said in February that its Horizon Worlds game had grown to nearly 300,000 monthly active users — an increase from a few months earlier, but modest compared to Facebook’s more than 2.9 billion monthly active users. The company declined to provide more up-to-date figures for Horizon World.
Adding to Meta’s troubles is that US regulators are determined to stop the company from achieving the road to success, as it did by buying Instagram and WhatsApp. In July, the Federal Trade Commission sued Meta to block it from acquiring Inner, the maker of a popular VR fitness app. Meta is fighting the agency’s lawsuit, which it called “wrong on the facts and the law.”
Determined to rebuild his public image after years of headlines for unpopular decisions about political speech on Facebook, Mr. Zuckerberg has surprised some employees by making himself the innovative face of the company’s metaverse push. Mock-ups and demonstrations of Meta’s latest Metaverse techniques include footage of Mr. Zuckerberg demonstrating VR versions of his hobby, including fencing and a surfing-like watersport called hydrofoiling. The chief executive recently went on Joe Rogan’s podcast, where he told the popular comedian that building an immersive metaverse was his “holy grail.”
What we consider before using anonymous sources. Do the sources know the information? What is his inspiration for telling us? Have they been proven reliable in the past? Can we confirm the information? Even when these questions are satisfied, The Times uses anonymous sources as a last resort. The reporter and at least one editor know the identity of the source.
His involvement has also been reversed several times. In August, Mr Zuckerberg posted a screenshot of his Horizon Worlds avatar to his Facebook page, along with the announcement that the app was expanding to France and Spain. But Avatar’s flat, cartoonish look was ridiculed. (a commentator comparison For “the 2002 Nintendo GameCube release”.)
Following that response, Mr. Zuckerberg and other officials instructed employees to prioritize improving avatars’ appearance, according to two employees. Facebook spokesman Mr Stone described Zuckerberg’s reaction to Avatar’s response as “disappointed”, but did not provide additional details.
A new version of Mr. Zuckerberg’s digital presence was fast-tracked, both employees said, along with updates to other Horizon World avatars that were in the works.
Four days after Mr Zuckerberg’s original post, he shared that enhanced digital version of himself, acknowledging that his first incarnation was “quite basic”, while “the graphics in Horizon are capable of much more.” claimed by a meta graphic artist a linkedin postWhich has since been dropped, that he and his team produced about 40 versions of Mr Zuckerberg’s face over a period of four weeks before approving the final version.
Mr. Zuckerberg’s enthusiasm for the Metaverse has been met with skepticism by some Meta employees. This year, he urged teams to hold meetings inside Meta’s Horizon Workroom app, which allows users to gather in virtual conference rooms. But many employees didn’t have VR headsets or hadn’t set them up yet, and had to scramble to buy and register the devices before managers could get caught, according to a person with knowledge of the incidents.
In a May survey of 1,000 Meta employees conducted by Blind, an anonymous professional social network, only 58 percent said they understand the company’s Metaverse strategy. Employees have also complained about high turnover and frequent reshuffles due to Mr. Zuckerberg’s change in priorities. Inside Meta, two employees said, some employees now jokingly refer to major Metaverse projects as MMH, an acronym for “make Mark happy.”
In September, Vishal Shah, the vice president in charge of Meta’s Metaverse division, wrote on an internal message board that he was disappointed that some Meta employees were using Horizon Worlds, according to a post obtained by The Times.
In his post, which was first reported by The Verge, Mr Shah said managers would begin tracking Horizon Worlds’ workers’ use, and said testing their own technology was necessary.
“Why don’t we love the product we made so much that we use it all the time?” Mr Shah asked. “The simple truth is, if we don’t love it, how can we expect our users to love it?”
Mr Shah, who declined to comment to The Times, also said in his post that Horizon will have to undergo a “quality lockdown” for the rest of the year to “enhance the overall craft and enjoyment of our product”.
As Meta struggles to grow its Metaverse, some in the company have suggested unconventional ideas to bring in new users. According to an internal post seen by The Times, this summer, three Meta employees proposed marketing VR headsets to Americans who received student loan relief from the Biden administration, believing it would drive sales of the headset. can increase up to 20 percent.
“This is an opportunity for Meta Quest to grow, as there is evidence that previous Federal Stimulus drove growth,” the analysis read. It does not appear that the company acted on advice.
A prominent insider who has objected to Zuckerberg’s approach to the Metaverse is John Carmack, a well-known game developer and former chief technology officer of Oculus, the VR company Facebook acquired in 2014 for nearly $2 billion. He continues to work part time. As a consultant in Meta.
In a podcast interview in August, Mr Carmack said that the scale of Meta’s Metaverse bet – last year, it reported a $10 billion loss in housing its AR and VR units – made it “sick to my stomach” , thinking that so much money is spent.” He added that Metaverse development of the Metaverse has been hindered by concerns about large company bureaucracy and issues such as diversity and privacy.
Mr Carmack has also spoken on Workplace, Meta’s internal message board. In a post obtained by The Times, Mr Carmack, who is speaking at the developer conference on Tuesday, criticized the features of the company’s VR headsets, calling them “extremely bad for user enjoyment” to run software updates before use. called need.
Mr Carmack did not respond to a request for comment.
Mr Carmack’s criticism has landed him in trouble with executives such as Andrew Bosworth, Meta’s chief technology officer, who has overseen the company’s VR efforts for years and is a close associate of Mr Zuckerberg. Mr. Carmack, according to the four employees he worked with, urged the company to think about the Metaverse primarily from the immediate user experience, while Mr. Bosworth approached it from a long-term perspective with a focus on business. opportunity.
As the pressure mounts, Zuckerberg has sent a clear message to Meta staff: Get on board or get out. At the June meeting, first reported by Reuters, the 38-year-old billionaire said there is “probably a bunch of people in the company who shouldn’t be here” and that he would “turn up the heat” on the hopes. and Target, according to copies of his comments shared with The Times. Since then, the company has halted most hiring, reduced budgets, and Mr. Zuckerberg asked managers to begin identifying underperforming employees.
Faced with potential layoffs, some Meta employees have begun to express more enthusiasm for the Metaverse. Several employees said more teams have been holding meetings inside the Horizon workroom in recent months.
But the transition has been rocky. Earlier this year, Mr. Bosworth tried to lead a staff meeting inside the Horizon workroom, according to an employee present.
The employee said that the meeting was called off due to a technical snag and the team ended it using Zoom.
