Horizon Worlds allows users to create (or visit) spaces where they can hang out, play games, meet other people and chat with friends. In fact, the platform’s user base has grown tenfold after expanding to all Quest users in the US and Canada last December, something that probably contributed to the popularity of Meta’s Quest 2 headset during last year’s Christmas shopping season.
But now it seems that Meta is adjusting his expectations. According to the WSJ, Meta aims to reach 280,000 monthly active Horizon Worlds users by the end of this year instead of the original goal of 500,000. And while the company said it had about 10,000 separate worlds in February, WSJ reports that only about nine percent of these virtual locations are visited by more than 50 users, and most users do not return after a month of using the platform.
In a statement to the WSJ, a Meta spokesperson said the company’s metaverse plans are a multi-year effort and that it is constantly making improvements. Meta didn’t immediately respond to The edge‘s request for comment.
Earlier this month, The edgeAlex Heath reported that the team behind Horizon Worlds is facing a number of quality issues affecting the platform. In a memo, Meta’s VP of metaverse, Vishal Shah, said the team is going through a “quality lockout” until the end of 2022 to pause the rollout of new features and address the platform’s buggies.
“Feedback from our creators, users, playtesters and many of us on the team is that the total weight of papercuts, stability issues and bugs makes it too difficult for our community to experience the magic of Horizon,” Shah wrote to employees, while they also wonder why staffers don’t use the platform much themselves. Meta later rolled out a new tool that should make it easier to report bugs from within the Horizon Worlds app, and even admitted in a blog post that the platform was “unstable” during a contest it recently held in the app.