• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

Horizon Worlds leak: only 1 in 10 users return after a month, web launch coming soon

https://mixed-news.com/en/horizon-worlds-leak-only-1-in-10-users-return-web-launch-coming/
Horizon Worlds is struggling to retain users, but Meta plans to improve avatars and expand Horizon to phones, tablets, and computers in an attempt to boost numbers.

Alex Heath shared more details from an internal Meta meeting in an ongoing series of leaks. This week’s Command Line newsletter centered around Horizon Worlds and Meta’s avatars.

According to Heath’s source, Horizon Worlds is failing to retain users, with only one in ten returning to this virtual social space after a month. Meta is supposedly aiming for a 20 percent improvement in retention this year. We reached out to Meta but haven’t received any comment on the leaks.

Meta has taken several steps recently to increase interest in its Horizon social VR platforms, expanding finally to Europe, but more is needed to keep people coming back.

The goal is to move more people from traditional, flat social media into VR and 3D representations in preparation for the metaverse. Better avatars may be the key to making this happen.

Horizon might come to the web soon​

Meta always planned to allow Horizon Worlds to be accessed from a computer, tablet, and phone, as well as an immersive view within a Quest VR headset. Horizon Workrooms has this ability now, allowing webcam users to participate in a VR meeting on a virtual flat-screen within the 3D environment.

According to the latest leak from Meta’s internal meeting, this ability could come to Horizon Worlds soon. When this happens, the report shared that Meta expects 90% of Horizon users will come from the web rather than VR.

At that time, Horizon could be intriguing enough to bring new users, but it might become disastrous if VR users are not well received by the majority of people that interact via the web.

Will improved Horizon avatars help?​

Meta is doing intensive research on avatars and has demonstrated realistic human faces with its Codec Avatars. Unfortunately, Horizon avatars remain simplistic and still lack legs.

That might change in 2023. According to Heath’s report, Meta hopes to increase the number of people using Meta avatars to 75 million across Facebook, Instagram, and VR. While the selfie photo will never go away entirely, many people choose stylized profile images, so there’s room for Meta to gain more avatar users.

Improving Meta avatars will be an essential step, and legs might help. Meta’s Horizon VP Vishal Shah was quoted as saying, “I promise you this product, legs, will be very exciting, and we will get made fun of for it at the same time.”

We’ve been hearing about legs for quite some time, and Meta demonstrated full-body tracking with a Quest 2 in September of last year. Perhaps in 2023, Horizon will finally have a leg to stand on.

Horizon’s recent improvements aren’t enough​

Meta Venues moved to Horizon Worlds in June 2022, hosting live concerts in VR. Free concerts are a great idea, but after the show, everyone leaves.

Meta’s Horizon Home, also introduced in June, received an update in September, expanding your Horizon Personal Space to invite a group of close friends to a cozier environment.

It isn’t that Meta hasn’t tried to improve Horizon Worlds. Despite these efforts, this virtual space hasn’t really captured people’s imagination for gaming or seemed compelling enough as a social venue. If you compare playing an intense action game, solving a puzzling mystery, or hanging out with friends in a casual game of golf, Horizon Worlds feels a bit lifeless.

Horizon needs to be a much richer environment that offers fun and exciting content that can’t be found elsewhere. That is difficult to create in an open, world-building app that began as a social space without game mechanics. Gaming is possible in Horizon Worlds but it isn’t competitive with true game-focused apps.
Meta-Avatare-bekommen-Beine-und-bessere-Grafik-860x484.jpg


Seems Zuckerverse is having a retention issue across the board and not just with hardware.

If they expect that when they launch on the web outside of VR, that that's where 90% of the users come from, than the whole point of Horizon Worlds being the "entry-point to the metaverse", whatever that means, has failed.

Already Zucker wants to lower the age requirement to play HW's to gain more users, but if they are already going to make a web at for people on tablets, phones, and computers, then he's basically admitting that the vision is dead.

Legs coming to the avatars aren't even the problem, Horizon Worlds is well, I mean look at the images and videos from users playing it and you will notice the problem immediately. That's supposed to be the app which they lost much cash on and won't kill or replace, to try and LOCK people into Facebooks ecosystem. Oops, I mean Meta.

It seems like they see the goose is cooked, and will launch it as a web app mmo style along with VR, making it pointless to the original vision since if they do that, you won't need VR to access Horizon Worlds any longer.

I feel like despite the PR up front, in the back everything is falling apart. I wonder how top people in the company are reacting to all his moves, and investors to his losses.

"According to Heath’s report, Meta hopes to increase the number of people using Meta avatars to 75 million across Facebook, Instagram, and VR. "

Ok, but if you mandate the avatars on various social media so you can say there's a certain million than it's pointless. There were supposed to be tens of millions of users on Horizon Worlds specifically. That was the whole point of the metaverse and the name change.

Welp, I guess that's over.
 

Zones

Member
They are trying to replicate the now defunct Mii / Xbox avatar concept after more than a decade via a less accessible medium...

Are they legitimately so delusional to seriously think this would be how people and businesses would interact in a serious manner?


confused-perplexed.gif
 
Look at that garbage. It's not VR's fault. That's like a terrible movie coming out and bombs. It doesn't mean people just aren't into movies anymore.
 
Here's the problem with Meta Horizons. Their entire business model was this:

A) Create a blank VR "metaverse" framework with no content
B) Open the empty framework to content creators
C) Let content creators do all the work of building something this thing of immense value, for free, and don't pay any development costs at all
D) Profit!


Except who wants to build a bunch of content for Meta, for free? Oh yeah, no one except bored college students. That means you end up with an empty, useless, garbage "metaverse" app that has no compelling reason to use.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Isa

Crayon

Member
This whole concept is still so weird. Okay so you can meet groups of people. You have a vr social space which can be pretty cool. But you don't actually get to see their faces like a video chat would let you do.

The whole thing sounds like a napkin sketch of an idea that would be for a perpetual lockdown scenario. Maybe I have to look into it more but I've never seen what the real hook is supposed to be.
 

poodaddy

Member
I have no fuckin clue what Horizon Worlds is and I'm still not completely certain on that information after reading that. That might be more than a part of why it's failing.
 

StreetsofBeige

Gold Member
This whole concept is still so weird. Okay so you can meet groups of people. You have a vr social space which can be pretty cool. But you don't actually get to see their faces like a video chat would let you do.

The whole thing sounds like a napkin sketch of an idea that would be for a perpetual lockdown scenario. Maybe I have to look into it more but I've never seen what the real hook is supposed to be.
Aside from the first person 3D view, whats really the difference between VR chatting vs. Second Life or any other social meeting kind of program where you meet people using avatars?

 
Last edited:

Crayon

Member
Aside from the first person 3D view, whats really the difference between VR chatting vs. Second Life or any other social meeting kind of program where you meet people using avatars?

There's not really a big difference on paper. VR does put a neat spin on a social space though. It definitely makes it feel more like people are there with you. Plus you can set up activities and since you can use your hands there is more variety to the types of things you can do. I think any given person may prefer one or the other. It could skew depending on the platform. They opened vr chat to flat users and I don't think many people in there like being a "deskie" with no way to gesticulate when they are socializing.
 
VR can and will be "successful" now.

I heard this in 2017 too.

Aside from the first person 3D view, whats really the difference between VR chatting vs. Second Life or any other social meeting kind of program where you meet people using avatars?

[/URL]

The VR requirement, which is about to be shuddered.

I have no fuckin clue what Horizon Worlds is and I'm still not completely certain on that information after reading that.

It's the gateway to the metaverse.

What is the metaverse?

No one knows, but it's a thing that needs to be done and all the peope like you will use it for everything and it all requires a headset, now I guess it doesn't.

Still not sure what it is? Neither do they.
 

mckmas8808

Mckmaster uses MasterCard to buy Slave drives
What is the metaverse?

No one knows, but it's a thing that needs to be done and all the peope like you will use it for everything and it all requires a headset, now I guess it doesn't.

Still not sure what it is? Neither do they.

The Metaverse will be real one day. It's just that stupid execs are pushing too hard and its too early for it.
 
The Metaverse will be real one day. It's just that stupid execs are pushing too hard and its too early for it.

This implies you know what it is, and yet almost everyone who thinks so has a different answer.

What's likely is under a new name, some concepts people associate with the verse will come in a new package no one thinks of and THAT will be the VR internet people keep looking for. It likely won't be Facebook that gets there. Also likely 10 years from now or more.
 

Three

Gold Member
This whole concept is still so weird. Okay so you can meet groups of people. You have a vr social space which can be pretty cool. But you don't actually get to see their faces like a video chat would let you do.

The whole thing sounds like a napkin sketch of an idea that would be for a perpetual lockdown scenario. Maybe I have to look into it more but I've never seen what the real hook is supposed to be.
I think if somebody makes a VR and camera set that digitally removes the headset from a 3D video feed they would be able to do a killer 1 to 1 meetings app. Maybe this is what Apple's thing is about showing your eyes on a display.

The problem is that the metaverse, this virtual reality, is required because you can't organically share documents and have multiple people in a stereoscopic video call.
 

Lasha

Member
Horizon worlds is awful. My sibling didn't even have it installed when I tried their quest. Most of the experiences involve standing around rudimentary 3d areas while a video plays on the horizon. The few games are neat. I enjoyed basketball and one of the village shooting games. The novelty wears off quickly though. There's no meat or creativity within Horizon Worlds. Fortnite or Minecraft are better metaverses than Horizon Worlds.
 
I have no doubt that Meta has spent one bajillion dollars on convincing people to buy into the Quest 2 and all their other shit. The problem is it sucks. And frankly, before I ever buy a Meta headset again, I'd like to see the Zuck have his head blown off photorealistically, in VR – to prove how good the effect is.
 

Resenge

Member
Horizon worlds has a bad reputation in the Oculus Subreddits for shitty moderators. If you get banned from Horizon worlds then you can get your whole account banned and lose access to all your Quest purchases, plus you needed to have a facebook account to play, not sure if thats still the case.
I know many players wont touch Horizon worlds due to that, not to mention it's shit.

banned from using my quest 2 for 24 hours??

Genuine PSA: Do not play Horizon Worlds. It's not worth the risk.

Banned on Horizon

Banned for no reason, Support not helpful

I can't figure out Meta's gameplan with that app.
 
Last edited:

StreetsofBeige

Gold Member
I have no doubt that Meta has spent one bajillion dollars on convincing people to buy into the Quest 2 and all their other shit. The problem is it sucks. And frankly, before I ever buy a Meta headset again, I'd like to see the Zuck have his head blown off photorealistically, in VR – to prove how good the effect is.
Meta loses over $10 billion a year on their VR Lab division. This might be two years in a row of that. Lucky for them the company as a whole still makes like $20 billion profit. Somehow FB and Instagram actually make $30 billion profit to cover the -$10B.

If it wasnt for Zuck opening up the corporate wallet (wiki says Meta bought Oculus in 2014) keeping it alive for another 9 years, the entire Oculus set of VR wouldnt even exist.
 

mckmas8808

Mckmaster uses MasterCard to buy Slave drives
Meta loses over $10 billion a year on their VR Lab division. This might be two years in a row of that. Lucky for them the company as a whole still makes like $20 billion profit. Somehow FB and Instagram actually make $30 billion profit to cover the -$10B.

If it wasnt for Zuck opening up the corporate wallet (wiki says Meta bought Oculus in 2014) keeping it alive for another 9 years, the entire Oculus set of VR wouldnt even exist.

That's not true at all. It's very possible that Oculus would still be around had Facebook not have bought it 9 years ago. It would more than likely have way less headsets though. But I think that would have been a better approach. This shotgun approach that Zuckerberg is currently doing is stupid to me. It's too much choice. Sometimes too much choice is bad. Just make a decision and focus hard on two main products for more been 2 years.
 
I still don’t get it. It isn’t sims. It isn’t Microsoft Teams. It isn’t Dreams. What is it? Just put it on PSVR2 add some office software in it. PS5 owners wont have another choices.
 
Top Bottom