When Zuckerberg articulated his vision for the metaverse in October 2021, the idea of a digital utopia where people could connect and interact in immersive virtual environments seemed achievable.
The billionaire founder believes the metaverse is the next frontier, and the company subsequently began investing billions of dollars to develop the technology needed to realize its metaverse strategic vision.
Zuckerberg even renamed Facebook to Meta to reflect its new strategic ambition to build the metaverse. The metaverse is a virtual world built on virtual reality and augmented reality technologies, where people can interact, work, and create in this environment.
Given the massive sums invested by Meta (which has invested about $46 billion in the metaverse since 2021) and other competitors in this concept, it is hard to imagine why the metaverse has not taken off.
Four years after Meta's strategic shift, the metaverse has become one of the biggest failures in the tech industry in recent years. Due to its failure to deliver on its grand promises, the tide of billions of dollars that once flowed into the sector has receded, and public interest has dramatically declined.
According to DappRadar data, the trading volume and sales number of metaverse NFT projects in 2024 have fallen to their lowest levels since 2020, with trading volume dropping 80% year-on-year and sales plunging 71% compared to the same period last year. Experts say Zuckerberg's gamble on the metaverse has turned into a complete disaster. In 2024, Meta's Reality Labs, responsible for developing metaverse products, reported a record operating loss of $17.7 billion.
Meta's official financial report shows that Reality Labs has accumulated losses nearing $70 billion over the past six years.