RIP Metaverse, ein Müllcontainerbrand im Wert von 80 Milliarden US-Dollar, den niemand wollte | Wer außer allen anderen hätte das vorhersagen können?
https://www.404media.co/rip-metaverse-an-80-billion-dumpster-fire-nobody-wanted/
RIP Metaverse, ein Müllcontainerbrand im Wert von 80 Milliarden US-Dollar, den niemand wollte | Wer außer allen anderen hätte das vorhersagen können?
https://www.404media.co/rip-metaverse-an-80-billion-dumpster-fire-nobody-wanted/
25 Kommentare
Some highlights from this opinion piece:
>When Zuckerberg announced Horizon Worlds not really all that long ago at a batshit livestream in October 2021, I wrote an article called “Zuckerberg Announces Fantasy World Where Facebook Is Not a Horrible Company.” During that livestream Zuckerberg said, “I believe technology can make our lives better. The future will be built by those willing to stand up and say ‘this is the future we want.’” The future Zuckerberg wanted, at that time, was not a future anyone else wanted. But he was bold enough to systematically light roughly $80 billion on fire, not because he was willing to stand up and paint a vision of the future, but because Facebook was mired in various horrendous scandals and because he needed to rebrand his company and needed something shiny to point at to keep Facebook’s stock price up. It is bad when actual economists say that money was thrown “into the toilet.”
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>Zuckerberg’s bold vision of the metaverse was a place where T-Pain would sell NFTs of imaginary sneakers at concerts attended by people sitting silently in their living rooms with computers strapped to their face, where Wendy’s could do integrated brand deals in which human-shaped avatars without legs could throw baconators at basketball hoops, and where Zuckerberg could pretend to know how to surf. Even on these pitiful metrics, the metaverse failed. “Whatever the metaverse does look like, it is virtually guaranteed to not look or feel anything like what Facebook showed us on Thursday,” I wrote at the time.
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>The complete and utter failure of the metaverse is a reminder not just of the fact that the future Silicon Valley is force feeding us is not inevitable, but that quite often these oligarchs quite simply cannot relate to real people, don’t know how or why people use their products, and very often have no idea what they’re doing.
This is a good reminder here that those in tech leadership positions aren’t necessarily better than anyone else, but have been luckier than most. It might be too much to hope that incidences like these will inject a dose of humility into those who tend to suffer from a surfeit of hubris, but at the very least hopefully the pedestal that they’re placed on is lowered at the very least.
I don’t understand what they thought would happen, maybe if they *gave away* the VR headsets or did something to encourage the platform, but they made like a shittier second life that looked like it was made in Roblox and waited for the crowds to come a running.
Author might want to have fact checked that they were never shutting down Horizon Worlds in the first place, just the VR version, and even that isn’t happening anymore.
I wish the whole company would be shut down
[They’ve already reversed this decision.](https://gizmodo.com/meta-after-killing-the-metaverse-just-kidding-2000735795)
Damn, they were right, I should have bought digital real estate when I still had the chance.
Well at least those Meta developers made generational wealth these last couple of years lol
They also renamed and rebranded to Meta. Do they find another name or go back to Facebook? Or lean into an AI related name? 😆
Isnt abosuletly absurd that they can just piss away what 100+ entire countries dont make in a year (GDP), and still get to keep their jobs?
I spent enough time on Second Life to know from the outset that the whole Metaverse concept was DOA.
He really thought people wanted to hang out as legless cartoons in a fantasy world
Should have thrown in a dozen GTA budget games
I truly do NOT understand where the 80bil went. The look of the metaverse was absolute garbage. Like, first year student garbage. I know performance was an issue but still… Were there many people working on this? Or perhaps a gigaton of marketing? Where did the money go, Mark?
Before binning it they should make it opens source so some people in the future can build upon in so all the AI agents can be in the metaverse or make the metaverse for ai agents
They should have bailed after the first year when it was becoming clear no one wanted this.
That being said, when you get to the size of Meta and co, you start trying crazy things no one asked for because you’re trying to make various „moonshot“ bets. You’re not looking for steady returns in a safe, proven markets, and start trying to invent new markets no one asked for.
The most successful bets in history have been forays into new markets no one asked for. E.g., AWS, AI, etc. Meta just predicted wrongly with respect to VR. It wasn’t to be the next big thing. But even Apple dedicated quite a bit to VR.
Most such ventures fail. Just look at how many Google X projects fail. But they’ve got cash to burn on moonshot bets.
It’s amazing what founders can get away with. Just goes to show how useless company Boards are.
Shedding no tears for those who bought „real estate“ in the metaverse.
Fun fact. They used a tonne of actors up in Vancouver to train the ai model to track people using the goggles. Extra fun fact, meta stopped paying the contractor and most of the actors never got paid.
I guess you could say that experiment didn’t have legs.
This is proof, just like with AI that just because a company really fucking wants something to happen, doesn’t mean it will.
And it caused the company name change from facebook, which is cool, to the stupid meta
Ok, look, we all know this was a failure, but I’ve seen at least 5 headlines in the last 48 hours and the amount of money it has lost was different in every one. And all of them are inflating the prior.
I’ve seen 20 billion, then 50, then 55, then 65, then 70 and now this one being 80. Pick a number and run with it and it, being the actual loss.
Nice…now do Gen AI
How do you even spend 80 billion on this shit though? I get it includes hardware development and infrastructure but that’s just a crazy figure for something no one really asked for.
Is money even real?
He wanted to control the platform like owning the next version of the internet but he is the gate keeper. I have made VR content for business clients and it is cool but it is just not going to take over as a lot of these guys envisioned. Ready Player One was not a utopian movie, it was dystopian.