Facebook’s metaverse endeavors are continuing to face major problems. According to internal memos obtained by The Verge, Horizon Worlds, Meta’s virtual reality-based social network, is suffering from numerous quality issues. These problems have reportedly gotten so bad that the team building the platform hasn’t been using Horizon Worlds very much.
In one memo dated September 15th, Vishal Shah, the Vice President of Metaverse for the company, said the team plans on remaining in a “quality lockdown” for the rest of the year. This aims to ensure that the company can “fix our quality gaps and performance issues before we open up Horizon to more users.”
“Since launching late last year, we have seen that the core thesis of Horizon Worlds — a synchronous social network where creators can build engaging worlds — is strong,” Shah said in a September memo. “But currently, feedback from our creators, users, playtesters, and many of us on the team is that the aggregate weight of papercuts, stability issues, and bugs is making it too hard for our community to experience the magic of Horizon. Simply put, for an experience to become delightful and retentive, it must first be usable and well-crafted.”
In a follow-up memo that was sent out on September 30th, Shah claimed that employees still weren’t using Horizon Worlds enough. He then went on to say that Meta was developing a plan that would “hold managers accountable” by having their teams use Horizon at least once a week.
Despite what internal memos might say, Meta remains steadfast in releasing Horizon and building out its metaverse. A spokesperson for Meta told The Verge that the company is “confident that the metaverse is the future of computing and that it should be built around people… This is a multiyear journey, and we’re going to keep making what we build better.”
Horizon Worlds is a multiplayer social gaming platform that was launched on Meta Quest headsets last December. The Verge reports that Horizon Worlds hit 300,000 users earlier this year.
(All information was provided by The Verge)
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