Does Mark Zuckerberg Not Understand How Bad His Metaverse Looks?

Mark Zuckerberg has once again been roasted on Twitter, not over barbecue sauce or surfing this time. On Tuesday, he posted a screenshot from Horizon Worlds on Facebook celebrating the game’s release in France and Spain.

The image shows Mark’s dead-eyed Avatar standing in an empty landscape populated only by a small version of the Eiffel Tower and Spain’s unfinished Sagrada Familia. The image made “Second Life” trend on Twitter for a while yesterday, with people saying it somehow looked worse than the decades-old life sim. I made the comment that this is what Mark Zuckerberg is trying to do with his metaverse on the same day Fortnite introduced its megapopular crossover with Dragon Ball Z, bolstering its much more fun, better-looking version of the concept.

The thing is, this happens all the time with Zuckerberg and his metaverse because Horizon Worlds has looked terrible since its inception and has barely gotten any better over the years, where its avatars still look like Miis from 2012 and they still don’t have legs.

Granted, I understand that showing 2D screenshots of VR is difficult, and that VR generally lags behind traditional console and PC gaming in terms of graphics. And yet that doesn’t change the fact that even within VR, Horizon Worlds is one of the worst-looking offerings I have seen, and that Meta has spent something like $10 billion chasing its Horizon, VR-centric version of the metaverse, even embarrassingly changing their company name to reflect that. And…this is the result.

But this just keeps happening and Mark keeps proudly showing off these bizarre scenarios where he talks to Neil Degrasse Tyson and is unable to make his avatar do something approaching a convincing fist bump. Or there was the infamous VR tour of a disaster zone in Puerto Rico that was blasted online for being tone deaf (and yes, the avatars did actually look even worse in 2017, I’ll admit).

The problem here is pretty obvious. If you’re a Meta investor, and you have the head of the company saying that the metaverse is the future, Meta has a huge role to play in it, and then they keep posting things that look worse than PlayStation Home in 2008, I don’t know how you would have any confidence in that vision, or in that person.

The concept of the “metaverse” as a whole has become entirely twisted by both Zuckerberg and a literal army of web3 grifters trying to sell blockchain real estate and NFTs in empty worlds. The “real” metaverses, or the closest thing to them, are existing, large-scale games that have existed for years, and you can make the case that places like Minecraft, Roblox, Fortnite or even GT GT A Online are far closer to a traditional vision of the metaverse than anything Zuckerberg or blockchain nuts have come up with. Zuckberg has essentially banked everything on both VR, and the idea that people want to do extremely boring things in VR like attend business meetings or play ping pong. Even within the VR space, Meta’s $10 billion investment seems like it’s producing worse results than something like VR Chat, or the booming V-Tuber space on Twitch and YouTube.

This is just embarrassing, and yet Zuckerberg seems entirely immune to the embarrassment, or really just does not understand how bad this looks, both literally, the graphics are garbage and it’s bizarre no one has legs after five years of this, but also for him and his company and his grand vision of the metaverse, which he seems to understand less than all of his competition. This is not going to go well for him or Meta if he continues down this path.

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