YouTuber finds only 900 daily users in Horizon Worlds — Meta’s $36B metaverse
YouTuber Jarvis Johnson encountered less than 1,000 English-speaking users in Mark Zuckerberg’s $36 billion metaverse. The vast majority were under the age of 18. Children rampantly circumvent Zuckerberg’s poorly-enforced age limits and overwhelm gameplay.
Jarvis spent a full week living in Meta’s Horizon Worlds, the most popular metaverse. ‘Most popular’ in this case is certainly less than superlative, with Meta estimating fewer than 200,000 monthly users. Unfortunately, Jarvis’ investigation found that Horizon Worlds has closer to 900 daily users.
Other metaverses are even more sparsely populated. Plots of virtual land in NFT-based worlds have declined 98% or worse, and alternate metaverses barely exist beyond a marketing buzzword.
For adults wanting to interact with others in their age bracket and escape the hundreds of children running rampant throughout Horizon Worlds, enterprising players have engineered elaborate tests of adulthood to grant entry to members-only spaces. One adults-only lounge requires extending one’s avatar arm longer than a child would be able to fluidly extend Meta’s gyroscopic controller.
- In October 2022, Horizon Worlds claimed to have 200,000 monthly users, which was already discounted from its earlier claim of 300,000 monthly users.
- Zuck had set a goal of 500,000 monthly active users by the end of 2022. That obviously never happened.
- As of today, daily active users (DAUs) might have fallen below 1,000.
Horizon Worlds made Jarvis Johnson nauseous
Protos has previously covered the cratering of ‘metaverse’ properties in general, including significant drops in DAUs and the value of their native tokens.
According to Jarvis, using Google to query ‘Horizon Worlds’ returns embarrassing results like “Is Horizon Worlds still available?” and “What do you do in Horizon Worlds?”
While exploring Horizon Worlds, Johnson found most spaces devoid of humans. He described mini-games in the metaverse as “janky” and moving around felt stiff when he used default settings. The vast majority of games involved bouncing balls, all of which grew tired after a couple days of gameplay.
Even after tweaking settings endlessly, he admitted that Meta’s virtual reality (VR) headset made him feel nauseated. The YouTuber ingested copious amounts of anti-seasickness medication to make it through his full week commitment.
In summary, Johnson gave Horizon Worlds a week of his life and reported his comical findings. That amount of time is certainly longer than most of Meta’s users after a confusing signup process, rampant age limit circumvention, seasickness, and lackluster gameplay.
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