I'm not sure I have ever witnessed such a comprehensive industrial failure in the software world. There were some discussions about Facebook's ability to pull it off, but not that long ago, many still saw the "metaverse" vision as inevitable; a clear trajectory for the future of the internet.
And the failure isn't Zuckerberg's alone. Microsoft, Apple, and a good many others all crashed into the same wall.
> not that long ago, many still saw the "metaverse" vision as inevitable; a clear trajectory for the future of the internet.
> And the failure isn't Zuckerberg's alone. Microsoft, Apple, and a good many others all crashed into the same wall.
This is revisionary. Mark Zuckerberg's Meta was the only company to go all-in on the "metaverse". Microsoft has barely even dabbled in an adjacent area with the Hololens.
Apple has essentially zero exposure to anything like the "metaverse". Apple's Spatial Computing and its use of Personas and SharePlay is not like the "metaverse", despite the comparison between Meta's and Apple's efforts being perhaps inevitable.
The metaverse, as Meta pursued it, was a social media virtual reality space, and only one of the three companies you mention touted and offered a product for users in this space.
I think that Kinect and Hololens, or Magic Leap, or the VisioPro and the numerous other attempts are not simply adjacent, they are parts of the same ontology.
The goal is to replace displays and interactions by something new, more immersive, spatial and relying on movements rather than mechanical buttons.
And in my opinion they all failed for the same reasons, and it is on the input side.
The idea of a metaverse as a new internet was a way to capture was was seen an an inevitable evolution, but in the grand scheme of things, this is almost anecdotal.
Everything Meta did to make it a "platform" just contributed to making it worse than VRchat, a product by a company many many times smaller. It felt very designed with a "look at what we can do for Meta" and not "why would consumers use this over alternatives?" which always felt doomed from the start.
Meta (Facebook) always had a problem in execution even when their vision was solid which is sadly a rare occasion. This is why meta just buys products instead of developing its own (Instagram, Whatsapp, etc). It had a moment with the ray bans but that didn't last, the second iteration was meta'd all over.
Yup. The Facebook brand was long dead, and Meta is a good tech name even outside of AR/VR or metaverse. The fact that no one calls the company Facebook anymore shows that the rebrand was successful.
It's very different though. Alphabet was created more for financial book keeping. Google apps have no Alphabet branding. On the other hand, Meta was created because the Facebook brand was down in the rabbit hole, almost every product of it has the Meta branding prominently displayed.
Anecdotal but my parents know about Meta, because they use FB/Messenger daily. They have no idea what Alphabet is.
I’ve heard MANGA suggested as the acronym with Facebook’s new name. Though maybe it should be MAAAN, said in a tone of exasperation at tech company activities
Is it really? Instagram, arguably the most popular (or maybe just behind TikTok, I'm not sure) social network currently, has successfully disengaged from the tainted Facebook name entirely. It may seem like a small thing but I do think that has a deep impact on the average person's perception of the service. Especially in the younger generation, the Facebook name has a definite "ick" to it (is that what the kids say these days?), even if it's just because it's the "boomer social network" and not because of the myriad privacy concerns associated with it.
Is it possible all this was a major ploy to get around antitrust? I'm aware FB has been working on VR for a while even beyond the Oculus that they purchased but it's like... "Facebook bought Whatsapp, yes, but; we're Meta"
the rename came at a nadir of "Facebook" brand when there was lots of hate for misinfo, genocide incitement on the platform, etc. I think that's the more important context rather than "lol i bet we'll fool the antitrust guys w/ a quick name change"
> Microsoft has barely even dabbled in an adjacent area with the Hololens.
Well, I think of that more being due to their mismanagement with the whole WMR ecosystem. "Sterile corporate VR meeting rooms" sounds like exactly something that would have been from Microsoft rather than Facebook, but they tried too hard in some aspects (a half dozen companies making nearly-identical-but-not-really headsets! support built into the OS so deep that to remove it they had to brick everyone's headsets!) and not at all in others.
> Microsoft has barely even dabbled in an adjacent area with the Hololens.
This is revisionist, Microsoft has been tilting at the same windmill for a long time too.
They even created and subsequently removed their own native platform for Windows, used by many hardware vendors, whose products were bricked by the Windows update that removed the feature.
I also commented on WMR, but I took that as MS not being "all-in on the metaverse". VR alone isn't the same thing, and HoloLens as a platform seemed to have more of a vision for working in shared mixed reality.
I love my WMR headset, but Microsoft wasn't really pushing hard for the kinds of "social" experiences Meta was trying to get us to participate in.
>Apple has essentially zero exposure to anything like the "metaverse"
holy revisionism batman. It's literally right in https://www.apple.com/apple-vision-pro/. Half the page is "you can watch movies in 3D", the other half is "you can be next to people". They rewrote the visual appearance of all their OSes to match liquid glass on the Vision Pro. Their goggles display your eyes because they expected you to wear them so long it would make it feel more natural to the plebs around you not wearing them and not joining you enjoying spatial sound. Half their ad copy is about "making it feel like you're working next to people".
Apple went all in onto the whole Metaverse crap. They paid off just about every major tech reviewer, tech influencer and even tech bros with following on Twitter (and here, too) with "early access programs" to the Vision Pro. At least can give them kind of the benefit of the doubt because they somewhat quickly saw that it was a dead end.
I'm kind of sad they're now officially dumping it, it was always so much fun to see completely fake sponsored discussions on the Metaverse and Metaverse ads in podcasts, and book publications about it. There's something satisfying about watching that whole universe of cognitive dissonance and pretense. Like a sandbox demonstration of the fake hype this industry often indulges in.
Remember when they added legs and they were soooo proud of how it now had legs? But then turned out the legs weren't actually available, it was some minions wearing a motion capture suit specifically for the demo?
> During the most talked-about segment of the show, Zuckerberg proudly announced that legs were coming the metaverse, which sounds bizarre out of context (and kind of in-context), but it’s the solution to many years of Meta VR avatars being nothing but floating torsos. He and another Meta worker showed off their new legs by kicking and jumping, and Zuckerberg talked a little bit about legs and why it’s taken so long to get them.
> “I know you’ve been waiting for this. Everyone has been waiting for this,” said Zuckerberg. “But seriously, legs are hard, which is why other virtual reality systems don’t have them either.”
> But it turns out the legs that were shown off with all that kicking and jumping were fake. That was not actually Mark jumping, the sequence was pre-rendered for the show.
Zuck and Co just completely failed to read the room. Horizons didn't fail because the technology wasn't ready - it failed because nobody actually wanted the product. It didn't solve any problem and added a ton of friction (headsets, eye goggles, no legs, etc). The headsets were uncomfortable and isolating. The vibes were creepy and weird.
The rolled it out like a cheesy corporate team-building mandatory exercise, not something where anyone would want to actually spend any time by choice.
I used to work at meta, I was in one of the many research teams that were upstream of horizon.
The Failure was pretty much entirely Zuck's fault, in the same way that when a ship smashes into rocks, its the captain's responsibility.
The first big problem is that there was never a clear definition of what "the metaverse" was mean to be. It was a pivot that kinda appear after orion (the AR glasses that were supposed to ship in 2020 Q3) failed to ship.
A small team had made a VR clone of roblox, where you could make your own games in VR. It was low poly and stuttery on the Quest. Another team was working on getting hand interaction into the quest. A third team thought "hmm, we have a avatar system, what if we can type on keyboards? could we have meetings"
The meeting system and the roblox clone carried on, vaguely separately. Then Zuck saw them and decided that they needed 500 more engineers each. Time passed, progress wasn't fast enough, so more engineers were smeared in.
Then the meta rebrand, and then the whole weird everything smashed together branding.
All the while more engineers were being piled in, most of them had no experience in 3d, let alone games.
But, that would have been fine if someone at the top had been steering, making joined up product decisions, Advocating for the users. carmack sorta tried, but a) he wasn't the easiest to work with and B) Boz thought he knew better
TLDR:
Zuck can't product for shit. He thought that shipping disjointed features would make a platform. It didn't. He also thought that dumping 11,000 people into an org, most of which have no experience of games, VR, 3d or graphics would lead to a good outcome.
When it started I thought it was one third Zuckerberg just being the romantic geek wishing to making his childhood gaming dreams a reality (and their adolescence continuation: becoming the best virtual swordfighter by merit of having commissioned the algorithm), one third Zuckerberg having been so spoiled with luck that he involuntarily seeks ever more unlikely odds to finally experience failure and finally the last third shareholder representatives being rightfully sceptic pushing Zuckerberg into a control frenzy where he'd eventually do it just to show "them" that they have no power to stop him.
I wonder why he didnt just buy his way into this too. I guess Valve wasn't up for sale haha.
But he could have tried the VRChat folks, and Bigscreen. I guess he bought the Beat Saber folks, but he probably needed to buy a big game studio and maybe one with experience shipping successful MMORPGs.
The Oculus is actually pretty decent for the price and as a standalone device. The issue is the OS feels so... like it was built by a big company with a dysfunctional org chart?
It's still an unfocused mess.
The bigger issue is, VR will ALWAYS be a niche thing. Always on AR glasses are the real future bet, not a niche industry.
VR will never be as big as Facebook / Instagram / WhatsApp. It just doesn't make sense to invest so much into it. Not sure what Zuck doesn't see this?
IMO, VR could be huge, but it’s never going to happen when the platform is so locked down.
Meta could of been the hardware leader of a thriving ecosystem, but instead they tried to replicate the walled garden of app stores that are failing in 2026.
VR headsets are at least fun. These glasses though, seem really dumb. I doubt they will ever be ubiquitous. I certainly wouldn't be caught dead wearing a surveillance device made by Facebook of all companies.
Zuck never seemed to actually articulate how this was any different or newer than a sterile corporate vr version of second life. Then VRChat got big and seemed to be better than Horizon Worlds for... everything.
I feel like the main possible benefits that these digital spaces bring, for consumers, are kinda the opposite of things that any Big Corporate Entity would ever want to be involved in.
Zuck just goes 'all in' on every hype and blows billions, because he doesnt want to miss out on anything. What is a few 10s of billions here and there for a company with a money printer.
VR will probably always be pretty niche for gaming. Even with affordable headsets, there is still a lot of friction to their daily usage that limits their appeal
- VR sickness
- Lack of physical space in people's homes
- Don't really work as a shared experience without multiple headsets
On top of that, this company in particular is Facebook. Nobody likes Facebook.
I am one of those people who love VR gaming done well. There is a game called Super Rumble built by what I think is a subsidiary of Meta. It's a very well executed arena FPS concept. There are just a couple dozen people in the world who are really skilled and play enough for me to recognize them and be glad they're playing when I'm also online. It's magical when there are good people on this thing playing together.
I hope it's something we can figure out how to propagate despite the seemingly limited interest. I suspect anyone who liked playing quake arena games would love this game if they are not susceptible to motion sickness.
I recently started exploring how to port open source shooters (red eclipse, warsow, nexuiz) to the platform and realized there are several considerations that make games designed for VR special that a pure port wouldn't hit.
It seems like there really isn't much of a market for VR gaming, though. It would have failed just as miserably.
Not only because of hardware costs, but not everybody can play them for extended periods of time and 'the youth' are increasingly preferring to look at social media over playing games.
> many still saw the "metaverse" vision as inevitable; a clear trajectory for the future of the internet.
As a VR enthusiast, I beg to differ. Anyone who had spent a lot of time in the space knew that this was largely a hardware problem.
You need a lightweight, see-through head mounted display. It needs to be aware of local lighting conditions and does more than just room mapping, which means it needs a lot of compute power. It needs to have eye tracking (for minor perceptual angle drawing, at least), a high resolution (or light field) display. It needs to stay cool, and have a 6+ hour battery life (which is one working session). Oh, and people don't like any tethers. Or controllers. Which means extremely accurate hand tracking and integration with a keyboard/mouse. Price doesn't matter, as much as people think. AVP costs less today than a mid tier powerbook 25 years ago. But that also needs to come down.
Apple Vision Pro is the first VR/AR headset to come close, by the way. And even that is very far off. In fact, I'd blame that more for this shutdown than anything single other thing: it demonstrated that Meta's hardware labs were so fundamentally off for what they were trying to achieve that it basically rendered their entire investment useless.
No, Microsoft bailed pretty early. Apple gave it one shot and gave up.
The entire VR/AR industry sort of crumpled up and died while metaverse was still burning a billion dollars a day.
I worked in a VR startup at the time. Nobody could find a customer and all the competing startups slowly bled to death (including mine). Everyone was really holding their breath that Apple Vision would bring some life back to the industry, but once it became clear that it was a flop, everyone gave up.
First one was I think during the releae of the first Oculus, when still hardly anyone got to actually try out VR headsets. An absolutely HUGE area in one of the main halls, the queue going once around the entire area, many hours of waiting time, etc.
Second visit was two years later, in the "indies, hobbyists and everything else hall" - staffers of some Chinese gaming startup were stopping random passersbys and essentially pleading for them to try their VR game - the headset of course being technically superior than the Oculus during the first visit...
Meta going so hard was part of the covid “new normal” psychosis. Surely we’ll all just stay home and buy crypto assets for the rest of our lives! The hardware I think is pretty good - I just never really found a use for it.
Yes! And now Meta is chasing that too and failing. It's not clear to me what advantage developing its own LLMs affords Meta. Google and the other platform companies, I get it, but it's not like Meta is using what's unique about their social data to train something interesting.
I think the general strategy for a long time in the tech world was to have as many of the programmers as you could under your umbrella. You don't necessarily know what you are racing towards, but the general feel was you knew that programmers were going to get there.
Speaking of Apple, and honesty asking: how are their VR devices going? Looks like they released a spec'ed up version with the M5 processor end of 2025 but, what's their future? There was some (artificial?) hype in the beginning, are people actually using it? What's the SV landscape?
Nobody knows what's going to happen. The device and the ecosystem absolutely did not live up to the hype, but Apple is still investing in it, including software updates. Rumors are that they are developing a second gen headset targeting $2000 price point, but they are also leaning into smart glass products.
Otherwise, look up WSJ reporting on the subject and reddit.
It sold terribly. The update was super-minimal, and mostly seemed to have been made for production-simplification reasons (as in: it was cheaper to update it than to keep making the old product, and they apparently didn't want to just cancel it entirely).
Rumors of future products are never super-reliable, but point to their ambitions being downscaled at best. Really, everyone expects them to pivot to smart glasses, because that's what they clearly wanted to make all along, and there's probably a market for smart glasses in a way there isn't for... whatever the AVP was supposed to be.
In the Apple ecosystem 'just a spec bump' is pretty significant IMHO. So often they will completely disregard products and just let them languish. The Mac Pro still only comes with the M2 chip.
All companies, those with enough resources, tend to put money on all the horses when they can—Meta, Apple, Microsoft included.
I was surprised though that one of them changed the name of their entire company.
Ever since the "power glove" and that 1st lauding of "VR" in the 90's, I've been bullish. People don't want that shit on their heads (I keep shouting). If you want to argue that people want immersion, I'll suggest they also want immersion that they can instantly look away from.
I agree with you... but was it actually a failure? I feel like that would require to have some kind of negative consequences, which I don't think Meta has faced over this. They've still been rewarded handsomely.
The hardware is actually pretty decent, and some VR games work really well. For example this table tennis simulator honestly feels life the real thing, even down to the little "tap" in the bat when you hit the ball :
I think it was totally predictable, I was telling my colleagues at Meta back then the Metaverse was completely toast in 2020 for a variety of reasons that only Mark Zuckerberg in his infinite wisdom couldn't see clear as day.
The Metaverse was not something that Meta was good at, they went about it all wrong and it was doomed to fail.
> many still saw the "metaverse" vision as inevitable
TBH, people who don't use VR probably think it inevitable due to all the ads, marketing, and especially movies' romanticized of the virtual world. People who actually bought a headset and put it on their faces know this shit will never become mainstream in the current form factor.
The management of the whole Reality Labs thing was incredibly bad, and this is Zuck's fault, I agree.
But my take is that, given the efforts of other big player in the same field (Hololens, VisionPro, the VR stuff from Valve, Sony, Samsung, etc.) at least one of them would have gained traction and the entire field would have followed behind.
• Not just a Meta failure: 70+ years of VR history (including Microsoft’s Hololens flops and Apple’s Vision Pro stagnation) shows every major player slammed into the exact same wall: betting billions on “inevitable” infrastructure instead of experiences that actually answer “why VR?”
• The metaverse was never inevitable: Horizon Worlds peaked at 300k MAUs, cratered below 1k DAUs, and is now shutting down. Meta burned $73B building ghost towns; the real survivors (Beat Saber: $255M revenue, VRChat: 150k+ concurrent) succeeded by giving users embodied activities and emotional hooks, not empty virtual offices.
• Hardware wasn’t the problem: Quest 3 is cheap, comfortable, and capable. The comprehensive crash happened because giants chased AAA ports and productivity tools while ignoring what actually retains users: presence + community + meaning.
• Management-school case study, updated: The $70B lesson isn’t “VR died.” It’s that corporate metaverse bets failed exactly where indies and niches thrived.
VRChat won because it's a relatively open platform. That's it. The people in there spent money on Meta hardware when it was better but they would then use it only in VRChat.
If a big company embraced an open platform I suspect the space would be far successful. Still a lot of untapped potential.
VRChat is successful because someone can show up in a Goku avatar and start roleplaying. A DJ can stream their twitch steam right into an instance.
VRChat still has no real store system having people upload unity projects manually to use a custom avatar. There's an entire universe of potential revenue if a clothing, avatar, and instance space system was built into the client.
You can buy avatars now from the VRChat marketplace for VRChat credits (that yre essentially Japanese Yen in value :D). It is progress but wit the unfortunate bad practices of the platform reportedly taking a sizeable cut.
In that regard the long term practice of the artists and users of their creations (mainly avatars) transacting directly via Booth or Gumroad can be seen as healthier & more robust long term.
I wouldn't feel that smug considering these are single prompt generations on a pretty small project.
As Two Minute Paper's always says, it's not just about what this looks like at the moment, it's about what this might look like another three breakthroughs down the line.
While you can't guarantee further breakthroughs, at the rate of advancement and pace of improvement, you would have to be brave to bet on no further breakthroughs.
I agree with you, but I think it skips over the fundamental point of the demo - that this is possible at all. The door is unlocked. I expect where commercial interests will take this over the next year or two, even without further "model breakthroughs" will be enough to change how many devs engage in game development.
Yeah exactly, build a library of a hundred or so stock game templates and just let the model configure / modify them as needed. Would cover most use cases.
To an extent, but with caution and charity. A lot of exceptionally good people have come from bad families - one of the Borgias was a saint, for example. A lot of exceptionally nasty people seem to have perfectly nice families.
Of course sometimes people who are, for example, brought up to be racist, are racist.
Passive noise cancellation beats active hands down. (no weird air pressure, reliable, no need for batteries, less expensive)
Analog and wired beats bluetooth if you care for sound quality, portable DACs are very good in 2026.
Professionals are using BeyerDynamics and Sony headphones made for studios and almost unchanged since the 90s for good reasons.
The only good reason to opt for wireless is for practical reasons when you are running, and you want smaller models.
How much of this article was AI written? I can sense the AI smell all over the place, also I found it way too long with little substance, but maybe that’s just me.
Bozhidar always writes like this. I can see why you would think it's AI style but I would vote that it isn't. Look at some of his pre-AI blogs, if you care to.
Guilty as charged! :D Short essays are definitely not my forte. (and this one is definitely longer than I wanted it to be, but in my typical style I kept adding to it after I wrote the initial version, and I'll probably add even more content after I go over all the discussion here)
Well, I guess that means I'm still a pretty poor writer. :D (I'm the author of the article) These days I do use AI to touch up my grammar and fix my typos, but I'm still write my articles myself and you feel that the article lacks substance - that's on me.
For me essays are something very personal, so it'd hard for the AI agent to read my mind about my thoughts on a subject.
I didn't get that feeling. But it is long, which is a bit of an AI smell. That said, I think use of AI in writing might not always be a negative. On a couple of documentation pieces I have used AI to provide better structure to writing that I've started and check for technical correctness parts of a document where I need to check my terminology. As long as the original idea is human and AI helps to make the signal clearer, I'm ok with it.
If there is an AI boom, what we're seeing is its infancy.
Semi-autonomous coding is the first and most natural use case, thanks to vast amount of training material, opportunities for closed-loop RL with minimal human supervision and the eagerness of the community to try and embrace new tools.
But it is still not much more than QoL improvement at this stage, and maybe some velocity gains for the most hardcore users willing to spend time and money to stay at the bleeding edge.
But there is also a rather large appetite for local models, I am not sure the future of AI will be 100% cloud based.
Were they ever out of it? A wolf in sheep's clothing is still a wolf... Microsoft has been incredibly anti-consumer for the duration of their existence (even before Steve Ballmer made it blatent)
It's not a vocab problem. It's inherent to the human brain, which appears to be fundamentally designed to prefer to view the world in terms of stories, with heroes, villains, and a narrative arc.
You don't have to tell me - even Bill S: "and what's he then that says I play the villain?"
Unfortunately, the collective quality of our storytelling is waning. Most people watch the least common denominator.
So now the greater human truth you allude to is being filtered through the streaming age mode of storytelling, and people have arcs, and bingo cards, and everything is reduced to water-cooler levels of urgency and relevance.
This isn't a new thing. Ancient stories like the Iliad or the Odyssey are discreetly historical records of a particular region mixed in with mythological foundations of a particular culture, but framed as the stories of Achilles ("Sing, O goddess, the anger of Achilles son of Peleus, that brought countless ills upon the Achaeans.") and Odysseus ("Speak, memory, of the cunning hero, the wanderer, blown off course time and again after he plundered Troy's sacred heights."). Likewise, ancient fables and parables are moral lessons couched in terms of stories with protagonists whose actions demonstrate the intended lesson, and this sort of thing is universal across every ancient culture for which we have records. Stories stick in the human mind, and they're what humans most prioritize transmitting forward through time.
Great person theory is hardly new either. I'm not sure the point. Really it's just "critical theory" for rich white men. I'm not convinced everyone or even a majority thinks this way innately. It's taught by people that want others to see them that way. Nothing here precludes that.
The complaint isn't actually about they way they're speaking. The way they're speaking is a symptom of the way they're thinking.
In an age of the dumbest, most propagandistic narratives since the 50s, pumped out by the largest multinational corporations in history. Young people are looking at the world through shitty Marvel movie-colored glasses.
It's also not their fault, and the fictions they think they're living through are written by gen Xers being paid by boomers. It is not a youthful point of view, it is the sabotage of any emergence of a youth point of view, substituted with Disney product.
> Language shifts and evolves over time as the lives and viewpoints of speakers evolve.
This is a "things just happen" argument. Things happen for reasons.
When Microslop bans "Microslop" I don't need to try. I use their software daily, I know how their technical support is utterly fucked now and how rare the heroic power user actually solving the case for every co-sufferer has become. And I know I'm not alone.
Just recently they fixed the Win 11 start menu bug where they forgot to expose any functionality behind the "hide mobile pane" button. At least the forced recents are gone now, Jesus Christ! This is toddler level software engineering.
It's a corporation suffering from corporate things and the ridiculously out of control financialization of everything, feeding on its insane first mover advantage and network effects. This attempt to hide it is simply embarrassing.
There's only gonna be so much thinking or research involved and forget contacting primary sources or anything like that.
Could not approve more a I use near identical naming convention in my C codebase. Not using the standard C library to avoid inconsistencies and the awful naming habits of that era.
I'm not sure I have ever witnessed such a comprehensive industrial failure in the software world. There were some discussions about Facebook's ability to pull it off, but not that long ago, many still saw the "metaverse" vision as inevitable; a clear trajectory for the future of the internet.
And the failure isn't Zuckerberg's alone. Microsoft, Apple, and a good many others all crashed into the same wall.
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