Meta launched an official public beta late last year on Meta Quest and Meta Quest 2 headsets for horizon Worlds, a VR social virtual world still in development. At the recent Meta All-Staff Conference, Chris Cox, Meta's Chief Product Officer, reported on Horizon's user growth. Chris Cox said that since the launch of VR social app Horizon Worlds for the U.S. and Canadian markets last December, its monthly active users have grown 10-fold to 300,000.
Meta spokesperson Joe Osborne reportedly confirmed the data on a conference call and said it included users of Horizon Worlds and Horizon Venues, a separate app for attending VR live events that use the same avatars and basic mechanics, and that number does not include horizon Workrooms, a VR meeting experience that relies on an invitation system.
Prior to its December launch, Horizon Worlds was in a private beta phase for creators to test their world-building tools. Similar to how gaming platform Roblox or Microsoft's Minecraft works, Horizon Worlds lets people build custom environments that act as avatars to hang out and play games in. Meta recently announced that 10,000 separate worlds have been built in Horizon Worlds to date, and the private Facebook group it has built for creators now has more than 20,000 members.
Given that Horizon Worlds has only been widely adopted for a few months, it's too early to tell if the app will continue to grow rapidly, but interest in Horizon has skyrocketed thanks to Quest 2's sales growth during the holiday season.
Meta has still not disclosed how many Quest headsets it has sold to date, making it difficult to measure Horizon's success versus the underlying hardware platform it runs. But some third-party agencies estimate that Quest's sales are more than 10 million. Zuckerberg recently said that Meta will release a mobile version of Horizon later this year to "bring the early metaversary experience to more than VR."
While Horizon Worlds has yet to make money for Meta, it's under tremendous pressure to succeed, especially considering the company's stock price has fallen sharply as investors questioned its expensive Meta development plans.
Ultimately, Meta hopes to fuse all of its Horizon applications to make them more accessible and even include the ability to connect with non-VR users, which will bring Meta closer to its goal of running its own metaverse.