That's the thing though, there is interest in "metaverse" style programs. VRChat, the biggest one, got 80k concurrent users last month (all time peak) according to SteamDB. Seems low, but hardware is a limiting factor for them.
What happened is Facebook's version of this was a corporatized, simplified, G-rated fraction of what its competition is. Despite being in a medium where the defining factor is the ability to look out the eyes of anything vaguely humanoid, you could only be a generic human who only exists from the waist up, devoid of almost any self expression beyond maybe accessories or retexturing.
As a result, there was no audience: the people who already use VR aren't going to go to an inferior product. And the people who would buy a VR headset aren't going to waste their time on a ghost town.
They hoped it would be a platform for fitness classes, business meetings, college classrooms, shopping, attending concerts [1] and so on.
If the primary appeal of your VR universe is that your avatar can be an anthropomorphic banana, an anime girl, a furry, a giant penis with legs - that's never going to become a 300-million-user platform.
They were all smooshed together with ~2000 non-game dev engineers and told to learn on the job.
It's not that the metaverse never took off — the popularity of Roblox and Second life (and other online social spaces) is proof that the metaverse was in demand. It's that Meta never gave people a reason to join their metaverse.
Note that I'm loosely defining the "metaverse" as any online world where the community is the point and people spend real money to "get ahead" in those worlds. Many MMOs can be metaverses in this sense. I've logged onto Final Fantasy XIV and saw people who logged on just to hang out at their friend's in-game house, not to play the game at all.
To some extent I still cant. The real indicator is when the crypto bros started peddling it, then we all knew it was shite.
[1]not by me; Mark, you can sue Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Oct ‘25)
I mean the inherent appeal of VR is self-expression; being who you want to be, seeing the worlds you want to see. You won't get 300 million users with corporate slop either. That maybe works once, if ever, VR headsets become an interface suitable for white collar work, which they currently very much aren't, and then it wouldn't be the next Facebook - it'd be the next Microsoft Teams. Which is not really in line with Meta's other offerings, though they certainly wouldn't say no to it I guess. But I think a 500-user survey is all it would take to get a very clear signal that current VR is NOT about to replace Teams.
No reasonable person shared this expectation. It was Juicero-tier delusion.
I'm absolutely sure there is a massive market (or at least user base) for a metaverse but until spending more time in VR than reality is mainstream, the audience is the underground clubbers and kids behind the bike sheds of the digital world.
Also you missed furries from your audience group, there is overlap but it is a pretty distinctive group that is actively drawn towards VR for creative expression.
But it is definitely limited by hardware and while it is constantly growing, its growth is dependent on there being a supply of relatively cheap hardware.
The problem here is that "the metaverse" has a specific meaning, and that meaning was a Potemkin-elevator-pitch.
People were envisioning the ability to take a rocket launcher from Halo and use it directly in all your other games. Which is a fun sketch*, but nobody thought past the sketch into any concept of why any game developer would support that, well, meta.
To the extent that VRChat gets around this, it's because it's being a playground rather than a meta-game. So, again, the "meta" part isn't there, at least not to the extent envisioned by people who saw Ready Player One and thought "Yes! Also, I like what Nolan Sorrento is saying, how many more ads can we put into our stuff?"
Though I’m personally happy to see massive corporations spend their money on pushing the state of the art in niche fields instead of using it for more evil stuff. I’m not sure why people care that they burn their own money on risky bets, that’s great for my point of view. We need more of that
