Mark Zuckerburg’s Meta failed. When Facebook announced last year that it was changing its name to “Meta,” in a sign of intent as to where they believed the industry at large was headed, some were disappointed. “How dare they take the name of the metaverse,” many lamented. However, with the nebulous concept of the metaverse now being referred to more as Web3, that conversation has waned a bit.
goal strives
But what exactly is going on with Meta and its effort to usher in the new era of social media? Zuckerburg’s announcement did nothing to quell the massive amount of selling, as Facebook’s stock price today trades at $129, a nasty 59% drop since the rebranding announcement. Nearly a year to the day of the Meta brand change, Zuckerburg’s utopian vision of some sort of Virtual Reality World Player #1 has never seemed so far away. Thousands of employees are working towards this goal, but the results so far have been disappointing, to say the least. This week, internal memos were leaked, which the Verge reported on. They were, I’m sure you’d agree, dark in tone. “Why don’t we love the product we build and use all the time so much”? Metaverse vice president Vishal Shah asked. “The simple truth is, if we don’t love it, how can we expect our users to love it?” he added. “The added weight of paper cuts, stability issues, and bugs is making it very difficult for our community to experience the magic of Horizon,” read another quote, referring to the Meta VR game.
Metaverse tokens are falling across the market
The drop in metaverse tokens in the year since is stark. Of course, cryptocurrency tokens across the market have fallen off a cliff, but the scale at which metaverse-related tokens have fallen is still worrying. Looking at the nine tokens in CoinMarketCap’s top 100 that are ranked as related to the “metaverse”, the average decline since Meta’s rebrand is frightening. I’ve plotted them in the graph below: Even more worrying is the drop in users of these games. While there appeared to be misreporting of active users on Decentraland – with alarming data suggesting that 38 daily active users were exaggerated – the fact remains that engagement in these metaverse games has collapsed in line with token prices.
Lately, there has been a lot of misinformation on the number of active users of Decentraland. Some websites are tracking only specific smart contract transactions but reporting them as daily active users DAU, which is inaccurate. — Decentraland (@decentraland) October 7, 2022
What happens now?
For Zuck, it’s been a difficult time. He even dropped out of the top 10 richest people in the US this week, yet another bitter pill to swallow. In all seriousness, the struggles of the vague but seductive metaverse are troubling. Games are struggling to be made to the standard of conventional non-blockchain games. With token prices on the ground, the play-to-earn model has suffered as a result, as without the potential for big wins, these games are just…less fun. It will be interesting to see how Zuck and Meta build from here. But for now, your bet on the metaverse so far has been reckless.
