What’s next for Meta’s metaverse

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What’s next for Meta’s metaverse

In October 2021,

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CEO Mark Zuckerberg sent his trillion-dollar social media company into a new direction.

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and Zuckerberg set his sights on a new horizon, the metaverse.

“There was genuinely a need and a desire at the time for

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, the company, to rebrand into something else,” said Leo Gebbie, principal analyst and director at CCS Insight. “The company

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wanted to make clear that it was more than just that one social website.”

While the term metaverse predates

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, Zuckerberg’s metaverse ambitions have existed inside Meta since 2014, when

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bought virtual reality headset developer Oculus and

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. Seven years and a global pandemic later, global video game industry revenue topped

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. Meta — and Wall Street — saw an opportunity to capitalize on an increasing online population, riding in on a virtual reality headset wave.

“There was a bit of a sense in 2020 and into 2021 that this was a technology that was ready, that it was finally going to hit the big time,” says Gebbie. “We’ve had a lot of false dawns in virtual reality in the past.”

In December 2021,

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and marked Meta’s entrance into the open world virtual reality platform space. Meta had a short-term goal of

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in Horizon Worlds by the end of the year. But its long-term goals were more ambitious. In June 2022, Zuckerberg told CNBC’s Jim Cramer that he expected one billion users by the end of the decade, doing “hundreds of dollars of e-commerce each.”

The company has a very long way to go.

An insider report

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in 2022 found Horizon Worlds was only seeing around 200,000 monthly active users less than a year after launch. And now, three years later, the term metaverse has largely disappeared from the public conversation, with

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noting a sharp fall in searches for the term after 2022.

To make matters worse, Reality Labs is hemorrhaging cash, racking up $58 billion on operating losses since 2020. It’s found some success in augmented reality, however, through it’s AR glasses partnership with Ray-Ban.

Meta didn’t respond to CNBC’s request for comment.

What happened to the metaverse? What exactly is the metaverse? And where is Meta today? Watch the video to learn more.

— CNBC’s Jonathan Vanian contributed to this report.

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#Whats #Metas #metaverse

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