An inside look at how Meta’s virtual world works and what its makers are fighting to build, even as the company's stock plunges 📝 andrewrchow
, and they boast plenty of games that do quite well. One of the most popular is Walkabout Mini Golf, a disarmingly simple but effective iteration of Putt-Putt. According to the game’s creators, it hosts hundreds of thousands of weekly players weekly in over 40 countries. When I enter the game, I’m paired up with an avatar who goes by “kennypowers,” speaks in a Southern accent and cheerfully walks me through the mechanics of the game.
In order to entice would-be gamers, Meta has spent the last eight years buying up a slew of virtual reality app makers—including the maker of the Viking combat gameMark Zuckerberg has explained his interest in gaming in near-humanitarian terms:that he dislikes how much time the modern world spends “passively” watching TV, and that a transition to more active gaming could result in a “net improvement in well-being for people overall.
“We’re trying to build something for everyday people who don’t have any pre-existing love for VR and are just trying to figure out the best way to get their job done,” he says.I can see the notes I’m taking on my actual laptop as I interview a man gesturing animatedly across from me, even though he’s 3,600 miles away.
At Connect, the company announced partnerships with other corporate entities like Microsoft, Zoom and Accenture, the last of which will work specifically to onboard all sorts of companies, from architecture firms to design studios to engineers, into virtual work. Workrooms is a free app, but if a sizable mass of companies invest in the headsets and start working inside them, Meta would count that as a win.
In our interview, Shah says he stands behind the message, and acknowledges that Horizon Worlds has to improve in many ways. “We are early in Horizon Worlds: it’s a pre-product-market fit product,” he says. “But it’s something we promised to build out in the open. And that’s why we launched it as early as we did.”