Horizon Worlds, the Quest headset VR social platform, is Meta’s most popular bet .
The company recently featured the platform in a Super Bowl ad, and Mark Zuckerberg described it as central to the company’s vision for Metaverse.
The company’s chief product officer, Christopher Cox, gave employees a virtual meeting earlier this week an update on the growth of Horizon Worlds users.
” The monthly user base has grown an average of 10 plus 300,000 people since Horizon Worlds rolled out to all Quest users in the US and Canada in early December,” he said.
A company spokesperson confirmed the statistics. He said the number includes users of Horizon Worlds and Horizon Venues, a separate app for attending live events in virtual reality that uses the same avatars and basic mechanics.
The figure does not include Horizon Workrooms, an invitation-based virtual reality conferencing experience .
Prior to its launch in December, Horizon Worlds was in a private beta for content creators to test its world-building tools.
Similar to how Roblox or Minecraft works, Horizon Worlds allows people to create custom environments to roam and play games as an avatar.
And Meta announced this week that 10,000 separate worlds have been built in Horizon Worlds so far. Its Facebook group for content creators now has more than 20,000 members.
Meta platform grows 10 times in three months
Since it’s only been a few months since Horizon Worlds has been widely available, it’s too early to tell if the platform’s rapid growth may continue or if the platform will be able to retain users over time.
The monthly users of social products are always higher than the daily users, which Cox did not disclose to employees.
The increase in Quest sales in the fourth quarter of last year also helped increase people’s interest in the Horizon Worlds experience.
Meta has yet to reveal how many Quest glasses it has sold, which makes it difficult to gauge the success of Horizon Worlds for its hardware platform.
But many third parties estimate Quest’s sales at more than 10 million. Zuckerberg recently stated that Meta may release a mobile version of Horizon Worlds later this year. Zuckerberg wants to bring his early Metaverse experiences to more places beyond virtual reality.
Bringing Horizon Worlds to mobile makes it a competitor to Rec Room, a social gaming app with 37 million monthly users across gaming, mobile and virtual reality platforms.
Although Horizon Worlds is not yet profitable for the company, the focus is on it to succeed. Especially given how the company’s shares are falling as investors question its costly push into Metaverse.
In addition to solving content moderation issues and underage users in VR, META has to make Horizon Worlds reliable enough for millions of people to use.
It is noteworthy that Facebook bet on its future by moving towards virtual reality and metaverse. The company was renamed Meta. It also pledged to spend billions annually to build hardware and software that transcend traditional social media.
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