This Wednesday, the company is holding its annual virtual reality event called Meta Connect. Perhaps it’s an opportunity for Zuckerberg to explain again his reasoning for taking an extremely profitable social media company and diverting his attention to an extremely unprofitable virtual reality company. How unprofitable? Well, the most recent figures from Meta are tear-jerking. Reality Labs, which as its name suggests is the virtual and augmented reality arm of Meta, has lost a staggering $21 billion since last year. Part of the losses reflect long-term investments. Meta didn’t expect any short-term returns, but what’s worrying for the company is that, so far, there’s very little evidence that this huge play will work. Horizon Worlds, a game published by Meta, is the closest the company has come to creating a metaverse. Users can access different environments (cafes, comedy clubs, nightclubs, basketball courts) to hang out and play games. Meta claims it has 300,000 monthly users, a small number compared to the billions of people on Facebook and Instagram. And at certain times far fewer people actually play the game. Users complain about empty worlds and say there simply aren’t enough people to make it fun. Or, if there are people, they are usually children. But the biggest criticism is that it looks a bit poor, similar to the graphics of the 2006 Nintendo Wii rather than the luxurious virtual reality experience that Zuckerberg promised.

We will also no doubt hear again that the metaverse is a long-term project, that we have not yet seen the real metaverse. Surely Zuckerberg still believes in it, as he expresses it through Meta’s checkbook. In July he said Reality Labs is expected to post even bigger losses next year. The metaverse, then, is still very much alive in Meta, but most of the rest of the tech world seems to have turned the page.