I am aware that the statement that gives the title to this publication may seem mine, because when I write about the Metaverse it is usually a rather negative tone, although I have made it clear on more than one occasion that I have nothing. against this. this platform. From an objective point of view, I have a hard time seeing the future in the short and medium term, but that doesn’t mean I’m happy about it or anything. I wish what was promised in its announcement could be true, a kind of Ready Player One, but today it is in many ways more comparable to Second Life’s sparsely populated Miis (Nintendo Wii avatars).

So, in order not to define the Metaverse as a purely touristic coastal town, which at the end of summer becomes an amalgam of all the collected, lowered shutters and abandoned streets, I must specify that, as we can read in the Wall Street Journal, I simply assume which is stated in an internal Meta reportin which you can read that we are talking about the reduced use of its platform, «An empty world is a sad world«, «An empty world is a sad world«and the fact is that today, despite the Meta’s efforts to avoid it, the Metaverse is not a very populated (cybernetic) space.

target initially The goal was to reach 500,000 monthly active users in Horizon Worlds, the gateway to the Metaverse, by the end of 2022. the current number is less than 200,000 according to the aforementioned internal report, which states, among other things, that even the Meta staff themselves are not particularly fond of the platform. This led, as we told you in this publication, to the fact that employees were obliged to fall in love with the Metaverse, starting with Horizon Worlds, which, according to managers, they will only achieve with regular use.

And if that data we gave you a few days ago was already wrong, behind closed doors, what TWSJ released shows thatThe situation outside is even worse, with the aggravating circumstance that, in this case, potential users cannot be required to access the service every day, as it would suggest to workers.

And the fact is that the data is even worse than it might seem, because when we are talking about 200,000 users, one might think that the key is that the service keeps growing over time… but the truth is that it , what it does is descending. Internal documents show this most users did not return to Metaverse after the first month on the platform and the number of users has been steadily decreasing since the spring. So, surprisingly, winter in the Metaverse seems to add “cold” to “sad and empty.” Meta was talking about 300,000 monthly active users at the start of the year, so we’re talking about a 33% drop in roughly two quarters, and no signs of a reversal.

In other circumstances it would already be negative, but we have to add growing investor unrest, who know that Meta has already invested $15 billion in Metaverse, but due to Meta’s lack of transparency in this regard, they claim they have no idea what it was spent on. We can imagine that a small portion will go towards giving the avatars legs, and that a slightly larger chunk will go into the design and production of Meta Quest Pro, an investment that we know will try to revive sales of this high-end browser. But it’s still a lot, too much money to use separately for both.