After writing about Meta’s highly misguided $50 million bounty for developers to create content in Horizon Worlds, a former software engineer at Horizon Worlds reached out to me. They had read my latest book, where I devote a chapter to Meta’s many missteps in trying to build the Metaverse.
But this engineer had even more surprising details to share.
I’ve always believed the fundamental problem is that Meta leadership never truly understood the metaverse concept, and simply treated it like a 3D version of Facebook. In interviews for the book, it also became clear to me that most of the people working on Horizon Worlds weren’t themselves experienced or passionate about virtual worlds.
Indeed, in 2022, Meta leadership sent out an internal memo requiring employees to dogfood Horizon Worlds more (i.e. actually play it).
It was actually worse than that, this ex-developer tells me. Required to dogfood their own virtual world, the engineer tells me, many Meta staffers automated their dogfooding:
"Before I left they were mandating that employees spend a certain number of hours per week in the game actively playing it. So therein started an automation war where all the people with 200 hours a week never actually played the game once. People just had to launch the game with an Android command over USB, then make sure the proximity sensor on the headset was taped to keep it on."
Yes: Instead of playing Horizon Worlds, developers of Horizon Worlds at Meta figured out a hack where they could just pretend to do so.
Meta’s assumptions were evident even on the code level, with Meta treating the Metaverse as a 3D version of a mobile app:
"Horizon Worlds / Workrooms, etc. is a pretty awful codebase with hundreds of people working on it. They grabbed a bunch of people from the Facebook/Instagram half of the company because they knew React. Horizon Worlds uses a VR version of that called ReactVR.
"What this effectively means is that most of the people developing Horizon Worlds (HW) are 2D app developers driven by engagement metrics and retention numbers. So... HW became flooded with a ton of 2D developers who never put on the headset even test their menus, all competing to try to create the most 'engaging' menu that would sell microtransactions, or drive social engagement, or make some other number look good - because that's WHAT THEY DO at Facebook/Instagram."
I go into much more detail on my Patreon, free to read here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/what-went-wrong-123796458
The leaders of corporate initiatives like this often tell themselves that they are building an ecosystem. They also seem convinced that an ecosystem will manifest from a highly curated, centrally developed silo that they have total control over. I guess it sort of worked for Facebook back in the day, but they were surfing on a lot of good will when it happened (and look at it now).
Things that are much closer to a metaverse than Horizons will ever be:
- Minecraft (Bedrock)
- VRChat
- Any popular multiplayer game that includes a free level editor
- The open web