John Mac Ghlionn

Opinion | The metaverse has failed? It never even took off

Meta’s big bet on the ‘next chapter of the internet’ has not paid off, while Microsoft has dismantled its Industrial Metaverse Core Team and Tencent no longer plans to make the hardware. What went wrong?

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A man experiences a virtual reality headset during the Dubai Metaverse Assembly at the Emirates Towers, in Dubai on September 28. Photo: AP

John Mac Ghlionn

Published: 3:45pm, 25 Feb 2023

Last month, The Atlantic magazine’s Megan Garber argued that we were already living in the metaverse. She’s wrong. More recently, The New York Times published a piece forecasting that the next housing boom will take place in the metaverse. It won’t. Nothing will take place there, because it does not exist. It is a concept, a hype-filled hypothesis detached from reality.

In October of 2021, Facebook made a big announcement to the world: the multinational technology conglomerate was changing its name to Meta. The new name was supposed to reflect the company’s expanding ambitions. Facebook was a company designed to conquer social media. Meta, on the other hand, had ambitions of conquering the metaverse, a wholly immersive virtual world facilitated by futuristic avatars and wearable devices.

This time last year, Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s CEO, called the metaverse, “the next chapter of the internet” – a chapter he and his colleagues were going to write.

Twelve months on, that chapter remains unwritten. The promises are still plentiful. But, as they say, talk is incredibly cheap.

Jemma Kelly, a columnist at the Financial Times, recently urged her readers to type “metaverse” into Google Trends. So I did. According to Kelly, “search traffic for the word has collapsed by about 80 per cent over the past year or so”. She’s right, it has.

This probably explains why Zuckerberg, who until very recently was waxing lyrical about the metaverse, now says that virtual space is no longer Meta’s top priority (imagine Elon Musk insisting that space exploration was no longer a top priority for SpaceX).