On October 28, 2021, Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of Facebook and then CEO of the company with that name, announced "the next chapter of the internet": the metaverse. The magnitude of the move was such that the company rebranded to Meta. "The metaverse is going to be first, not Facebook," the executive even said. Thousands of companies answered the call and hopped on this train. As of today, it can't be said that it has derailed, but perhaps it hasn't reached the expected destination either. There is a metaverse bubble deflating, and the tech sector seems to have forgotten its promises, now listening to those of artificial intelligence. Experts, however, believe it is still too early to consider it lost, although they think it will evolve into something very different from what was seen in those initial presentations by Zuckerberg.
Many companies joined this metaversal frenzy. For example, Telefónica appointed a Chief Metaverse Officer, Yaiza Rubio, who continues to lead these projects in the company. Meanwhile, many other firms began offering their products in the metaverse: H&M, Adidas, Louis Vuitton... Others focused more on the physical development and launched their virtual reality glasses with which, theoretically, one could explore these metaverses. Microsoft with HoloLens, HTC with Vive Pro, or Apple with Vision Pro, with a price tag around 3,500 euros. Several have fallen by the wayside.
"Many made glasses; all those who believed they would be a consumer gadget," recalls Antonio Ortiz, a tech analyst and co-author of the specialized podcast 'Monos estocásticos'. But "as soon as they didn't see traction in the market, they backed out," he explains.
Nevertheless, it was smaller companies that responded more strongly to Facebook's platform call. Becoming the reference promised a lucrative economic reward... although it wasn't the only one along the way. Thus, many crypto firms, a concept closely related to virtual assets in the metaverse through blockchain and NFTs, embarked on developing projects: metaverses, physical stores in virtual worlds, clothing, all kinds of collectible items. Silvia Leal, an advisor to the OECD, recalls those early metaverses that were little more than a world similar to a video game - the comparison with Second Life was common - with very little to do: "It was ridiculous because the immersive experiences available were rubbish; any amateur video game was much better."
"Almost any 3D world with some permanent components started to be considered metaversal," Ortiz agrees. However, he believes that "contradictory things were done," as the decentralized philosophy of web3 was combined - the best-known platform was, in fact, Decentraland - with speculative elements associated with cryptocurrencies and NFTs. A sweatshirt or even a plot of that virtual land were simultaneously unique assets. "There were many people with ethically questionable thoughts," laments Ortiz. Thus, a virtual scarcity was created that drove up the price of these properties. "It's a contradiction: the good thing about digital is that we could all have a mansion and a luxury car."
Eloy is the pseudonym of a former employee of one of these companies, who prefers not to reveal his identity because he still works in the sector. "It was a company that was creating a metaverse, but was also involved in the cryptocurrency sector," he explains. And when Facebook became Meta, "many cryptocurrency projects even remotely related to the metaverse skyrocketed." In his case, by holding onto some of the cryptocurrencies they had minted themselves, if their price rose, so did their profits.
When this worker joined the company, they were creating a metaverse, "but there was nothing tangible." "They had cool 3D designs, but there was no real development behind it," he recalls. Everything was done to attract attention, but the programming was progressing much slower. "It was a crypto sector company, which relies heavily on creating excitement and marketing entirely focused on playing with user expectations," Eloy emphasizes. Meanwhile, their cryptocurrency fluctuated with the improvements they were showing and the interest they generated both individually and as part of that initial vague idea of the metaverse.
"It was a project based on marketing," summarizes the former employee. When this concept began to lose strength, the project "started to die because there was no real way out either in virtual reality or as a metaverse platform." At that point, the company pivoted towards other projects - "the concept of AI in communications began to emerge" - and laid off some employees, although it did not disappear. "What was noticeable was a desire to tighten costs," Eloy recalls. "While the metaverse seemed to be the future, it was like a kind of party, and costs were not a concern; then it was time to tighten the belt," he says. And from what he saw, this was also the trend among his competitors: "They were small projects that had nothing, they didn't have a product as such." Currently, by the way, Decentraland has fewer than 40 active users per day, according to Dapp Radar data.
Asked about the current situation of the metaverse, Meta refers to two entries on its blog. One of them does refer to the metaverse understood as a virtual world; it details the advantages it would have in sectors such as education, with virtual campuses that create more of a sense of community than a simple online class. The most recent one, on the other hand, already combines the metaverse with artificial intelligence and mixed reality. They say, "The next big step towards the metaverse" will be to combine glasses with artificial intelligence (such as their Meta Ray-Ban) with the type of real augmented reality experience they propose with Orion, something much more immersive and also controlled by hand movements through a bracelet.
But if no one was clear on what the metaverse was - even today, not even Meta seems able to define it in a few words - why did so many people bet on the concept? The company helped generate interest: a study commissioned by Deloitte estimated that the economic impact of the metaverse in Spain by 2035 could reach 53,000 million euros. At the community level, they estimated that "the continued and successful development of the metaverse could generate between 259,000 and 489,000 million euros annually for the EU's GDP by 2035." That is, between 1.3% and 2.4% of the GDP. For comparison, agriculture contributed 1.3% to the EU's GDP in 2024, according to Eurostat.
Ortiz adds other factors. "First, the Oculus was amazing," he emphasizes. "They entered a field that was already dead and buried and resurrected virtual reality." Thus, despite the technology's issues - such as latency and the necessary connections for it to work well - "the wow effect is there." On the other hand, there is Mark Zuckerberg's own figure, what Ortiz calls a "sui generis leadership." "The five- or ten-year bets that Mark Zuckerberg allowed and still allows himself are not allowed to any CEO on the planet," he contextualizes before giving the example of Microsoft and its virtual reality headset, Hololens. "This leadership of Zuckerberg is accepted as long as Instagram and Facebook remain advertising cash cows," Ortiz details. "Of course, spending money for ten years is safe; that in the tenth year this will explode and I will start making money is uncertain," he explains. In fact, the glasses launched with Ray-Ban are quite reminiscent of Google Glass, which had little success, but with more mature technology... and less fear of failure.
Tangentially related is also Meta's - and its CEO's - vision of artificial intelligence. The bet on the metaverse has not meant forgetting other technologies: "It is one of the companies at the cutting edge of artificial intelligence since the ChatGPT starting gun," the expert recalls.
The last pillar on which Facebook's strategy is based is the very conception of the metaverse, which goes far beyond an immersive experience as initially proposed, that "crappy video game" Leal referred to. "Although that initial conception is neither technologically feasible nor seems to have a real user interest in buying that movie, many elements of the technological development leading up to it are starting to be leveraged," Ortiz points out. Thus, he highlights augmented or extended reality, as well as the possibility of monetizing developments in other sectors, such as virtual reality applied to defense to train soldiers.
"People make a mistake thinking that the space is what matters, not the experience," summarizes Leal. "Meta had decided, and continues to bet on it, that augmented reality, not virtual, has tremendous potential. And they are still there. Apple and Google, the same," he argues. And he believes that there is still much to achieve: "The potential is tremendous, but the technology was not developed." So, is there a metaverse? Yes, although not exactly as it was understood in those early years. "Now there is talk of a new term, spatial computing," explains Leal. It is a term that precisely encompasses the ideas that Meta deals with: augmented reality, haptic devices that allow receiving physical stimuli, overlaid information. "We don't talk about the metaverse because that term has been misused by people. But is it coming? Of course it is coming, like so many technologies that come and go until they consolidate," Leal insists. The expert gives a personal example: in 2017, she published a book, "No te vas a morir," in which she said that in the future we would talk more with chatbots than with our partners: "Do you think anyone listened to me?" And this is precisely the latest key in the metaverse journey: when the focus shifted to generative AI, everyone seemed to forget the previous supposed great revolution, but that doesn't mean it disappeared. "Now, when I give technology conferences, they no longer ask me about AI: they ask me about cybersecurity and quantum. There is less interest every time, because people already understand it, they incorporate it as something natural, and the next one is coming at any moment. Where is the investment going? Here, in the metaverse. It's coming," Leal concludes. "The metaverse works because we always want more investment and we prefer images over text and video; therefore, the next leap will be immersive," Ortiz points out. Referring back to the entry that Meta points to as a roadmap, it was Andrew Bosworth, Meta's CTO and director of Reality Labs, who in December of last year called for calm. "The best thing you can do when you are trying to invent the future is to launch things and learn how people use them," he stated. He also acknowledged that "they will not always be immediate successes," but "they will always teach you something." In that entry, he said that 2025 will be "a special year." "It's time to accelerate," he concluded his text. For now, these are the latest updates that Meta has provided on the metaverse.