Remember when the metaverse was really, really popular not very long ago?
Yeah, I don't either. Because it never was. It was instantly lame. Just a total waste of time, money, effort. A colossal failure. It would be funny if only it hadn't been such a massive wealth burn. (Okay, it's still kind of funny.)
That's not just me, by the way. Seemingly en masse this week, the media seem to have realized that the metaverse is pretty much never going to be a thing. Here's New York Magazine:
The metaverse was another supreme executive fantasy. Most broadly, it offered the prospect of a new frontier, the likes of which Zuckerberg hasn't seen since, well, his conquest of the last one.
That's probably quite accurate. The last time Mark Zuckerberg launched an ambitious new project, he basically conquered the world. This time he couldn't even conquer his own employees. Nobody likes the Metaverse.
As New York Magazine notes, the metaverse "represented an intoxicating fantasy," but it ended up being more like a nightmare: A weird, low-rent, legless world where people could stand around awkwardly pretending to do real things while actually doing nothing at all. It bombed because it was embarrassing and dumb.
And also really expensive and unpopular:
Unsurprisingly, "VR Chat but with capitalism" simply wasn't an appealing pitch for the vast majority of consumers, and the companies that did make a bet on their own virtual space found them expensive, far too niche, and ultimately inferior to a traditional, flat website in every way.
"Inferior to a traditional, flat website," you say?! How is that possible? How could this be considered inferior??
Business Insider, meanwhile, says the metaverse's death actually came from the one who originally created it:
[T]he Metaverse was officially pulled off life support when it became clear that Zuckerberg and the company that launched the craze had moved on to greener financial pastures. Zuckerberg declared in a March update that Meta's "single largest investment is advancing AI and building it into every one of our products."
Even Zuck couldn't stomach the nauseating world he'd designed.
