What happened to the Metaverse?

It wasn’t all that long ago when “the Metaverse” was being pushed hard in certain corners of the Big Tech universe.

What was it? It wasn’t always clear — something about a virtual but realistic place where, we were told, we’d be hanging out with friends, holding office meetings and even buying property. Contributing to the hype: a tech giant neck deep in a PR mess and eager for a rebrand.

Ok so, fast forward to today and not many people are talking about it much anymore.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg says his company hasn’t given up on the Metaverse just yet but his is among the firms now spending a lot less time and money on metaverse development.

Marketplace’s Lily Jamali spoke with Ed Zitron, writer and CEO of EZPR about what happened to the hype. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation

Ed Zitron: When you get down to what this actually entails, if you’re fully sincere about doing the Metaverse, it involves living in a virtual world that is somehow customized to the project or scope of whatever your business is. And that is expensive. It’s like developing a video game every single time. So you saw these companies spin up, get tons of funding and then they went, “oh god, this is so difficult, it’s so expensive.” It’s effectively the same development track as a AAA video game, except with none of the domain expertise and honestly, twice, three times the pressure, because it’s for a business thing. Those who did the Metaverse, quite a lot of them then realized, oh, there’s no money to actually be made in this. This doesn’t make money at all. This costs a lot of money, and doesn’t make us anything and people don’t like it. Because that was the thing, they tried to shove it down the throats of consumers, too.

Lily Jamali: Yeah. And what about the physical hardware involved? The Oculus headset, which Facebook at the time now, Meta, acquired almost a decade ago. And these are these virtual reality headsets. Did they just not ever get to the point where consumers would actively want to buy and use them?

Zitron: There’s two different, three metaverses if you really want to call it that, which is number one is the virtual reality. Oculus has been selling. Oculus has been, you’ve got other competitors like HTC VIVE, and you’ve got the Valve Index, and so on and so forth. So you do have a virtual reality industry. The problem is that when you try and scale that to the consumer level, you run into the problem that some people vomit when they use them. It’s a big problem with virtual reality.

Jamali: That is a problem.

Zitron: It feels bad, but also it’s just not there yet. It isn’t that comfortable, it isn’t that cool, it really isn’t turnkey yet. And so then you have the other metaverses, so you had the virtual worlds ones in like a browser and those, you had major brands using them. You had ones where they built their own worlds. There were multiple brands that did stuff and is still doing stuff with Roblox, for example. [Roblox is] basically a kids online RPG, kind of like Lego almost. They took their company public off the back of the Metaverse, and then the third one or the charlatans of cryptocurrency, who created extremely dodgy worlds like Decentraland and Sandbox, where it was you plugged these ultra expensive NFT’s in for an extremely mediocre experience that no one enjoyed.

Jamali: Well, let me ask you this Ed, is there a version of the Metaverse that you have ever felt good about, positive about as a concept?

Zitron: The problem with that is you look at Second Life. Second Life is probably the closest to an actual metaverse that you’ve actually seen. It’s a very customizable, 3D world.

Jamali: And this is something, for people who aren’t familiar, that’s actually been around for 15-20 years, right?

Zitron: Well, I cut my teeth in video games journalism. And I was one of the first people in England to write about massively multiplayer online RPG’s like Everquest, World of Warcraft. Second Life has been around longer than them. And Second Life is probably the closest and somehow is, I believe, still profitable. So that one is successful. If your definition of “metaverse” is just a successful virtual world, most massively multiplayer online RPG are a good example. Everquest was a huge success when it existed, World of Warcraft, you had many successful ones, especially in Asia. And these all predate this metaverse hype, and they’re all games other than Second Life, which is almost impossible to define. And the thing is, what you can look at with them and their successes is they actually had purpose. They weren’t glomming on to a trend. They were trying to do something.

Jamali: And is there a functional alternative at this point, if they are effectively moving away from this concept?

Zitron: I mean, alternative to what though? Because there never was anything, they’ll still support Horizon [Worlds]. They’ll still support these things. They’re still going to plug things into them occasionally. But the problem is that the Metaverse was never really a thing to begin with. And I think that that’s what people are missing. It was an already existent VR world that kind of stank. There was a huge thing about characters having legs in Horizon Worlds that then turned out that they didn’t have legs. And everyone just kind of made fun of it, because all Zuckerberg was doing was making a very vague, forward looking statement. And then everyone copied him. And it was very indicative of 2021, honestly – a lot of hype, but with nothing in the middle.

Jamali: Well, the kind of hype that you’re describing, is somewhat reminiscent of the hype that we’re seeing now around generative artificial intelligence. That does have very real applications and people are using it. It is integrated in people’s work and their lives now. But still, do you see any similarities between the Metaverse hype cycle and the one we’re seeing now with AI?

Zitron: I think there’s a little but generative AI actually does something. I think it does much less than people are claiming it will, but it does something, there is a product, there is ChatGPT, or whatever Facebook’s version of that will be, they have their own large language model they’re working on. And the similarities in the hype that people are seeing is this level of very big, flowery language about the future without having any tangible version of it to show today that speaks to that vision at all. Right now, the various versions of LLM’s, generative AI’s, they are able to guess what you might say next, or what you might want it to do based on the subset of data is trained on. And then you have Fortune 500 executives talking about automating half the workforce, or there was at Goldman Sachs [report], maybe 33% they said would lose their jobs by 2030 or something. You get these statements and then you look at the actual tech and you say, “what are you talking about?” It isn’t even like you can look at it and say, “oh, I can kind of see what you’re getting.” It just doesn’t exist. The difference is that in the case of the Metaverse, there was nothing close to even anything half resembling it. It was just a farce.

Jamali: A lesson for tech CEOs, if any are listening right now, if you create a product it has to do stuff.

Zitron: Yeah, that’s a good one!

More on this

Although it seems like Meta is putting the Metaverse on the backburner, it’s still working on its virtual reality simulator, Horizon Worlds, which could be called an outgrowth of all those investments.

New games and even a virtual concert by rapper Jack Harlow are being released consistently for users still interested in the concept.