Internal memo: Meta's VP of Metaverse says Horizon Worlds is suffering from too many quality issues and even the team building the app isn't using it very much
Meta's VR social network Horizon Worlds — the company's flagship “metaverse” app — is suffering from too many quality issues …
The VergeAlex Heath
Context & Ripple Effects
The memo identifies an adoption problem inside Meta's flagship social-VR product: the people responsible for building Horizon Worlds were not regularly using it themselves. Later internal documents put that quality-and-engagement gap in sharper relief, with roughly 200,000 monthly active users against a 500,000 year-end goal and only 9% of worlds reaching 50 or more visitors the later engagement shortfall.
Meta subsequently treated Horizon Worlds as a product-reset problem, planning retention work and access for 13- to 17-year-olds a planned retention-focused revamp, then describing a reboot around a game, mobile app, and a move from VR-only to VR-first the VR-first reboot.
First-order effects
Meta's Horizon Worlds team faces immediate pressure to fix core quality issues and use the service itself, making internal product validation a prerequisite for broader adoption efforts.
Creators and current users are left with a social platform whose quality problems undermine repeat use and the audience available to individual worlds.
Second-order effects
Meta's retention and audience-growth plans must compete for attention with foundational reliability and usability work, rather than relying solely on new worlds or access expansion.
The weak visitation concentration documented later makes creator incentives less effective until Meta improves the experience that brings users back and distributes them across worlds.
Third-order effects
If Meta's subsequent VR-first and mobile-oriented reset holds, Horizon Worlds' viability shifts from headset exclusivity toward cross-device social reach, with product quality determining whether that reach becomes durable engagement.
The episode points to a broader platform-governance challenge: immersive platforms need internal dogfooding, creator supply, and user retention to reinforce one another rather than treating device availability as sufficient.
The trend: Meta's Horizon Worlds strategy is evolving from a VR-exclusive metaverse showcase toward a quality-led, cross-device social platform effort.
I heard all this talk about the metaverse so I decided to go live there for a while. Over the last few months, I've been in Meta's virtual reality social network Horizon Worlds every hour of the night and day to meet the metaverse's earliest adopters. https://www.nytimes.com/...
Meta's flagship metaverse app Horizon is too buggy and barely used by the employees building it, per leaked internal memos from last month I obtained https://www.theverge.com/...
“A key issue with Horizon's development to date, according to Shah's internal memos, is that the people building it inside Meta appear to not be using it that much.” https://www.theverge.com/...
“Everyone in this organization should make it their mission to fall in love with Horizon Worlds” Meta is forcing some of its employees to use Horizon Worlds, and it sounds like torture https://twitter.com/...
Before you consider any VR/Metaverse pitch, first ask yourself “Why?” - I challenge myself with this question every time I'm designing a new feature, let alone an entirely new product. The bar gets higher every single day to earn (not just win) someone's attention. https://twitte…
LEAKED MEMO: Meta's own staff think its flagship Metaverse world Horizon looks shitty and barely use it themselves And Zuckerberg has staked his entire company's future on its metaverse plans. Yikes! https://www.theverge.com/...
Was speaking to a Meta employee last night. All of Meta's products are separated, they don't work together. Horizon Worlds is just a Unity game and their developer tools don't talk natively to each other. Zuck only cares about user numbers and data. https://www.theverge.com/...
Damn this is sad. Meta's VP of metaverse sent two memos to employees last month chastising them for not using the product they're building often enough. It turns out few people want to use Horizon Worlds, which doesn't body well for Meta's metaverse. https://twitter.com/...
Newsflash: the issue with Horizons in the context being talked about here isn't that it's not ‘good’. It's that it's not useful. This shtick has been around for 20 years now. ‘Generic’ virtual spaces in work contexts are time wasting gimmicks. https://www.theverge.com/...
How much would they have to pay you to not just work for Meta, but also be stuck wearing a VR headset all day so you can hang out in the awful dystopia of the metaverse with your coworkers? I'm looking forward to them burning the company to the ground with this stupid obsession. …
These guys never figured out the only thing they did right (being the first social network to get everyone to sign up then collecting their data) doesn't lend itself to doing anything else right https://twitter.com/...
Nothing says product market fit like an exec sending around a memo saying “everyone in this organization should make it their mission to fall in love with” this app people don't even want to use once a week!! https://twitter.com/...
Always funny when tech giants like Facebook/Meta say “product market fit” when they usually just force their users to adopt a new product, “fit” be damned https://www.theverge.com/... https://twitter.com/...
Can't wait to see how Zuck talks about Horizon Worlds next week at Connect😅 I'd love to join in the festivities in Horizon Worlds myself too but I'm geo-blocked from doing so because the Metaverse isn't as open as he like to portray it... https://twitter.com/...
this is so funny to me, facebook burning _billions_ every year in order to make a vrchat competitor no one likes or wants to use https://www.theverge.com/...