Since Its Launch In December 2021, The Meta Medsos Virtual Platform Has 300 Thousand Users

JAKARTA - Facebook has staked its future on virtual reality and the metaverse by changing its image and name to Meta. They've also spent billions of dollars in one year building hardware and software that can go beyond traditional social media today. It's just that Meta is still closed about the extent of their development so far.

Meta's biggest gamble right now is a social VR platform for Quest headsets called Horizon Worlds. The product was recently featured in a Super Bowl Meta ad. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, calls it "the core of our metaverse vision". Meta's chief product officer, Chris Cox, provided employees with a previously unreported update on Horizon's user growth.

He said that since Horizon Worlds rolled out to all Quest users in the US and Canada in early December, its monthly user base has grown 10x to 300.000 people.

Meta spokesman Joe Osborne confirmed these statistics and said the number includes Horizon Worlds and Horizon Venues users. These are two separate apps for attending live events in VR that use the same basic avatars and mechanics. However, that number does not include Horizon Workrooms, a VR conferencing experience linked to an invite system.

Prior to its launch last December, Horizon Worlds was in private beta for content creators to test its world-building tools. Similar to how the game platforms Roblox or Microsoft's Minecraft work, Horizon Worlds allows people to build custom environments to hang out and play games as legless avatars.

Meta announced this week that 10.000 separate worlds have been built on Horizon Worlds to date, and its private Facebook group for content creators now has more than 20.000 members.

Given that it's only been a few months since Horizon Worlds became widely available, it's too early to say whether the platform's rapid growth will continue or whether it will be able to retain users over time.

Monthly users for social products are always higher than daily users. This amount was not disclosed to employees by Cox. The increased sales in the holiday season for Quest headsets certainly helped encourage people to try Horizon.

Meta still hasn't revealed how many Quest headsets have been sold to date, which makes it difficult to gauge Horizon's success against the underlying hardware platform.

However, some third parties estimate sales of more than 10 million for Quest. Zuckerberg recently said that Meta will release a version of Horizon for mobile later this year to "bring the early metaverse experience to more surfaces beyond VR."

“So while the deepest, most immersive experiences will be in virtual reality, you'll also be able to access the world from your Facebook or Instagram apps, and perhaps more from time to time,” said the CEO at Meta's recent earnings call, as quoted by The Verge.

Bringing Horizon to mobile will position it as a competitor to Rec Room, a well-funded social gaming app with 37 million monthly users across game consoles, mobile, and VR.

While Horizon Worlds has yet to make money on Meta, there is pressure to make it a success, especially given how the company's stock has slumped as investors question the metaverse's expensive push.

Apart from solving problems with content moderation and underage users in VR, Meta had to make Horizon reliable enough for millions of people to use. Especially after so many people couldn't join the recent Foo Fighters concert held at the Venues after the Super Bowl.

Moreover, Horizon has not introduced a way for content creators to make money. But if initial user growth is any indicator, Horizon has a chance to make it big.