Mark’s metaverse: well that didn’t work, did it?

“We believe the metaverse will be the successor of the mobile internet,” Mark Zuckerberg said in October 2021. So confident was he in this vision that he rebranded his whole company around it.

And yet, not even six years later, that vision seems dead in the water. Thousands of Meta employees are now being moved across to work on AI. In a recent memo sent to the whole company, Zuckerberg announced that he was cutting 10% of the entire workforce. “Success isn’t a given,” he wrote.

How true – and it’s true even if you blow $80bn trying to make it a reality, which is what Zuckerberg did on his Horizon Worlds VR product. That was the social environment in which the company believed a billion people would soon be spending their time. Meta was always cagey about user numbers for the metaverse, but its own figures suggest this topped out at 200,000 in 2022.

Inevitably that failure has resulted in a lot of schadenfreude and crowing from the portion of society that, perhaps not unreasonably, believes Zuckerberg to be one of the great Satans of the modern age. But it’s possibly a bit premature to declare the entire concept of “the metaverse” done and dusted.

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It’s clear that Meta’s vision was flawed. Even during the bad times of lockdown, the huge demand for “life, but a really thin version that requires a massive, clunky headset to experience” wasn’t really there. The version of the future presented by Zuckerberg in keynotes and demos (and in which Nick Clegg was once memorably interviewed by the FT) was flat, cartoonish and famously bereft of legs.

The prospect of doing metaverse meetings, presenting quarterly results to the board as a Nintendo Mii-level representation of yourself, always seemed far-fetched. There was also the horrible stench of virtual salesmanship about the whole thing, with plans for users to be able to sell digital assets and experiences, like tickets to virtual gigs, artist merch for their avatars, or virtual jewellery.

Fundamentally-speaking, as with seemingly everything touched by The Hand of Zuck, there was always something fatally uncool about the whole enterprise, the spectre of extractive capitalism clearly visible behind the CEO’s blandly-smiling avatar.

As with many features trialled by the company since Zuckerberg hit paydirt with The Face Book back at Harvard in the 00s, Meta wasn’t able to quite work out what real people want from its products. That’s not to say, though, that the concept of “the metaverse” is quite as dead as many want to declare it.

The term, invented by scifi writer Neal Stephenson (maybe we should stop getting our future blueprints from dystopian novels), is relatively loose. Basically it just refers to a persistent digital universe, linked to the real world in various ways, in which people can spend time, often in immersive virtual reality. They talk, play, entertain themselves, buy and sell things, all of which very much happens in digital spaces in 2026.

So forget Mark’s Metaverse. What about Roblox? That’s a “place” where nearly 150 million kids worldwide hang out every day, meet friends, clothe their avatars, buy outfits and merch with real-world money, and even make cash through making and selling digital clothes or building virtual worlds for others to play.

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The space is always there, they can return to it whenever they want, and the things they earn and buy follow them throughout it. There are gigs by real-world artists in virtual form, there are film screenings, there are brands (surely the ultimate expression of real-life).

Fortnite ticks a lot of the same boxes, as do a variety of other games which function as social and entertainment hubs as much as any imagined metaverse. While it’s easy to dismiss this all as kids’ stuff, it’s huge business, it’s growing and there is a whole generation of young people that has grown up with some form of existence in digital space.

When they enter adulthood, why will they think differently, and why shouldn’t they want to continue having a digital life parallel to the physical?

Laugh at Meta all you like – after all, what’s funnier than one of the world’s richest businesses pissing 10 figures up the wall? But it’s worth remembering that what the future looks like won’t be determined by Geriatric Millennials, but by GenA and the just-born Gen Beta, who might be a lot more comfortable with time spent in digital worlds than you or me. The metaverse was never about the VR headset but about the idea behind it, and that’s still one worth exploring.