Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, shifted its focus some time ago. Not least the name change shows that Mark Zuckerberg sees his future in the virtual worlds and thus the previous cash cows Facebook and Instagram are neglected and record a steady decline in user numbers.
From a marketing perspective, however, Meta has done well. When communicating about the hypetheme Metaverse, it’s hard to get past the group. Many people even think that the metaverse comes exclusively from Facebook and that they drive all developments in it. We have already reported in the past that this is not the case.
But as last week’s coverage showed, the truth looks even less rosy than we were even allowed to assume. For the launch of “Horizon Worlds”, Mark Zuckerberg posted a selfie of his digital avatar in front of the Eiffel Tower, but what sounds like a good plan ended in a fiasco. The Internet had its fun with the miserable quality of the picture, which looked more like a poorly developed children’s game than a billion dollar business model.
There needs to be a German word that’s like schadenfraude, but specifically for how wonderful it is to see the company that helped break democracy pour $10 billion down the drain to create this hilarious 2022 lovechild of The Sims and Nintendo Wii. pic.twitter.com/czVcGQUBdM
— Brian Klaas (@brianklaas) August 17, 2022
It was clear that Mark Zuckerberg wasn’t going to take this criticism lying down for long, and he quickly posted an update on Facebook and Instagram explaining that the post was published very quickly to celebrate the day, and that Horizon Worlds is capable of much more and is improving very quickly.
Sieh dir diesen Beitrag auf Instagram an
Among these posts were another image of his avatar in extremely good quality, as we know from the promotional videos, and an elegant Roman-looking ruined landscape. But whether these aren’t just graphics quickly put together in a graphics program that don’t correspond to the true future of Meta’s Horizon, or whether we got a glimpse of a later version of the immersive world, that remains a mystery.
What do you think? Is our immersive future in the hands of Facebook or rather one of the other providers? Feel free to write it in the comments!
