Meta's Horizon Worlds VR platform is reportedly struggling to keep users

Horizon World, Meta's social universe set in virtual reality (VR), is reportedly struggling to acquire and keep users. Horizon Worlds currently has about 200,000 monthly active users, according to internal documents obtained by the Wall Street Journal, a drop from the 300,000-user milestone Meta confirmed to have hit back in February.

Horizon Worlds lets users create (or travel) spaces where they can hang out, play games, meet other people, and chat with friends. The platform's user base actually grew tenfold after expanding to all Quest users in the US and Canada last December, also contributing to the popularity of Meta's Quest 2 headset during last year's holiday shopping season.

But now it looks like Meta is adjusting its expectations. According to the WSJ, Meta aims to reach 280,000 monthly active Horizon Worlds users by the end of this year, instead of its initial goal of 500,000. And while the company said it had about 10,000 different worlds as of February, the WSJ reports that only nine percent of these virtual locations are visited by users over 50, and the majority of users have access to a single world after using the platform. are in the same place. Don't come back after months. ,

In a statement to the WSJ, a Metaverse spokesperson said the company's Metaverse plans are a multi-year effort, and that it is continuously improving. Meta did not immediately respond to The Verge's request for comment.

Earlier this month, The Verge's Alex Heath reported that the team behind Horizon Worlds is grappling with a number of quality issues affecting the platform. In the memo, Metaverse's VP Vishal Shah said the team is going on a "quality lockdown" by the end of 2022 to prevent the rollout of new features and address the platform's buggy.

Shah wrote to employees, "The feedback from our creators, users, players and many of us on the team is that the overall weight of the papercut, stability issues and bugs make it very difficult for our community to experience the magic of Horizon. gives... used to be." , also questioning why employees are not using the platform so much. Meta later launched a new tool to make it easier to report bugs from its Horizon Worlds app, and even acknowledged in a blog post that it was due to a contest recently held in the app. was. During this the platform was 'unstable'.

At the company's Connect event on Tuesday, Meta revealed the $1,499 Quest Pro VR headset for companies that want to collaborate in VR. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg also announced that Legs in Avatar is coming to Horizon Worlds, and showed off what it might look like during the presentation. It's unclear whether they'll actually look like that when they arrive at Horizon Worlds, as a Meta spokesperson told UploadVR editor Ian Hamilton that it's only a preview of "what's to come," and it didn't even show up. was. In Live VR.