Metaverse Division Is On “Quality Lock” Because Zuckerberg Employees Don’t Even Like It
Metaverse
Meta management has put the company’s metaverse VR platform, Horizon Worlds, on a “quality lock” until the end of the year due to persistent bugs.
When Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed a first look at Horizon Worlds, his company’s multibillion-dollar virtual reality metaverse venture, the platform’s graphics were mocked by the internet to the point that Zuckerberg issued a hurt apology shortly after . , stating that Horizon was “capable of so much more” and that it was “improving rapidly”.
It seems that even the Meta employees working to make those improvements don’t hold the platform in the highest regard either.
According to internal company memos obtained by The Verge , Meta’s Horizon Worlds team has been repeatedly reprimanded by department management for rarely using the platform, despite repeated orders to do so both at work and at home. Other memos reveal that the Horizon Worlds team has been instructed to remain in a “quality lock” for the rest of the year to resolve persistent issues with the look and feel of the platform.
“For many of us, we don’t spend a lot of time on Horizon and our news boards show this pretty clearly,” Meta’s Metaverse VP Vishal Shah wrote to employees on September 15. “Why is that? Why don’t we love the product we’ve built so much that we use it all the time? The truth is, if we don’t love it, how can we expect our users to love it?”
Metaverse
Two weeks later, Horizon Worlds management felt that their team members’ engagement with the platform remained subpar. In a memo dated Sept. 30, Shah wrote that a plan was in the works to “hold managers accountable” for making Horizon sessions mandatory for Meta employees to use the platform and to encourage them to share it with non-business friends. from work.
“Everyone in this organization should be on a mission to fall in love with Horizon Worlds. You can’t do that without using it,” Shah said. “Get into it. Organize moments to do it with your colleagues or friends, both in the internal builds and in the public ones so that you can interact with our community.”
Shah did acknowledge that the platform onboarding experience “is confusing and frustrating for users,” and that “the added weight of paper cuts, stability issues, and bugs is making it too difficult for our community to experience the magic of Horizon.”
For these reasons, the Horizon Worlds team was instructed by Shah on September 15 to remain in a “quality lock” until the end of the year to “make sure we fix our quality gaps and performance issues before opening Horizon to more users.
Metaverse
A Meta spokesperson told Decrypt that “of course, we’re always making quality improvements and acting on feedback from our community of creators.”
“This is a multi-year journey, and we’re going to continue to improve what we build,” the spokesman said.
Horizon Worlds’ problems are particularly notable in light of the exceptional amount of money Zuckerberg has directed into the division, which the CEO has repeatedly framed as the future of his company. In July, Meta’s metaverse division posted a whopping $2.8 billion in losses in the second quarter, bringing the group’s year-to-date losses to $5.77 billion. In 2021, the division lost $10.2 billion.
On Meta’s second-quarter earnings call in July, Zuckerberg repeatedly defended his metaverse division, Facebook Reality Labs (FRL), to shareholders.
“Clearly, this is a very expensive undertaking for the next several years,” Zuckerberg admitted at the time. “But as the metaverse becomes more important in every part of how we live…I’m sure we’re going to be glad we played a big part in building this.”
Metaverse
Meta has been aiming to dominate the metaverse – an immersive, future version of the Internet navigated by digital avatars – since changing the company name last fall. But while Zuckerberg has launched a voracious spending spree in the metaverse, the results have yet to materialize.
Web3 leaders have expressed skepticism about the company’s metaverse campaign. In late July, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin stated that “the metaverse is going to happen,” but that he didn’t think “any of the existing corporate attempts to intentionally create the metaverse are going to go anywhere.”
“It’s too early to know what people really want, ” Buterin said at the time. “So anything Facebook creates now will fail.”
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