What is the metaverse now, and where did it go?

A few years ago it was the future of everything. Then it quietly disappeared. Here is an honest account of what the metaverse was supposed to be, what went wrong, and what, if anything, actually survived.

Cast your mind back to October 2021. Facebook changed its name to Meta, Mark Zuckerberg appeared in a virtual world wearing a cartoon avatar, and the word “metaverse” was suddenly everywhere. Billions of pounds were committed. Consultants wrote breathless reports about virtual office space. Property developers sold digital land for real money. Technology commentators declared that the internet was about to fundamentally change.

By 2024, most people had stopped talking about it entirely. So what actually happened?

The metaverse, as it was pitched to us, was a persistent, shared virtual world where people would work, socialise, shop, and spend their leisure time through avatars and immersive technology. You would put on a headset, step into a digital space, attend meetings in a virtual office, hang out with friends in a virtual pub, and buy virtual goods using digital currency. Physical and digital life would blur together. This was the vision, and it was genuinely bold.

Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, placed the biggest bet. Between 2021 and 2023, the company spent somewhere in the region of thirty-six billion dollars on its Reality Labs division, which was responsible for developing the hardware and software to make the metaverse real. The centrepiece was Horizon Worlds, a virtual social platform that was supposed to demonstrate what daily life in the metaverse could look like.

Horizon Worlds was not a success. Reports emerged that the platform had very few regular users, that many of the virtual “worlds” were largely empty, and that even Meta’s own employees were not using it much. Zuckerberg himself had to issue an internal memo urging staff to spend more time in the platform. The avatars, notoriously, did not have legs. It became something of a running joke.

Microsoft also made a significant push, announcing a version of its Teams video-calling software that would feature virtual meeting rooms with avatar-based participants. It was called Mesh for Teams. In 2023, Microsoft quietly shelved the feature, laying off the team working on it. The virtual office was not, it turned out, something many businesses actually wanted.

The crypto-adjacent version of the metaverse fared even worse. Platforms such as Decentraland and The Sandbox sold virtual land during the peak of 2021 and 2022, with some plots going for hundreds of thousands of pounds. Brands bought virtual storefronts. Celebrities bought virtual mansions. At the height of the frenzy, Decentraland had fewer than a thousand active daily users across an entire virtual world that had cost people millions to populate.

What went wrong? Several things, and most of them were obvious in hindsight.

The technology was not ready. The VR headsets required to access these spaces were expensive, uncomfortable to wear for any extended period, and caused motion sickness in a significant number of users. The graphics were not impressive enough to justify the physical discomfort. Spending an hour in a virtual meeting wearing a heavy headset was not a better experience than a video call. It was a considerably worse one.

The social layer was also missing. For a social platform to work, the people you want to talk to have to be there. Facebook succeeded because it started with university students and then spread to everyone those students knew. The metaverse had no such anchor. It required millions of people to simultaneously adopt expensive hardware, learn new interfaces, and choose to spend their time in virtual spaces rather than the perfectly functional real-world alternatives they already had.

And then there was AI. In 2023, the release of ChatGPT shifted the entire technology industry’s attention. Generative AI was suddenly the most exciting space in technology, the area attracting the most investment, and the thing every company wanted to be seen as a leader in. Meta, to its credit, adapted. The company threw its resources into AI research, released its own open-source language models, and quietly repositioned itself as an AI company. The metaverse was not abandoned exactly, but it was no longer the main event.

So what actually remains? More than you might expect, though it looks quite different from the original vision.

Gaming is the area where something genuinely metaverse-like continues to exist and grow. Roblox, which allows users to create and share their own game worlds, has tens of millions of daily active users. Fortnite has hosted virtual concerts attended by millions of people simultaneously. These are persistent, shared, creative virtual spaces, and by most reasonable definitions they are closer to the metaverse dream than anything Meta built. They just do not require a headset and they are mostly used by teenagers rather than knowledge workers.

Enterprise VR has found a genuine niche in training. Surgeons practise procedures in virtual environments. Factory workers learn assembly processes before touching real equipment. Military and emergency services use VR simulations for scenarios that would be too dangerous or expensive to recreate physically. This is a real and growing market, just not the one that was being sold to the general public.

Apple launched the Vision Pro in 2024, a spatial computing headset that was carefully positioned as something different from the metaverse. Apple avoided the word entirely, instead emphasising the ability to overlay digital information onto the real world and to use applications in three-dimensional space. The Vision Pro costs around three thousand pounds and has so far remained a niche product, but it represents a different and arguably more honest attempt at the same underlying technology.

The honest assessment is this: the metaverse as promised in 2021 did not happen and is not going to happen in any recognisable form. The idea that millions of people would choose to spend their working and social lives inside virtual worlds, mediated by expensive headsets, was always more a corporate aspiration than a realistic picture of human behaviour. People did not want it badly enough to overcome the friction of the technology.

What survived is more modest and more useful. VR gaming is good. Training simulations have genuine value. The technology underpinning spatial computing will probably matter eventually, even if the current hardware is not quite there. And Roblox is very popular if you are under the age of sixteen.

The metaverse was not a fraud, exactly. The technology is real and parts of it have practical applications. But the gap between the vision and the reality turned out to be very wide, and the industry discovered that you cannot simply declare the future into existence by spending enough money and giving it a compelling name.