What went wrong with Horizon Worlds? Former Meta devs share surprising insights – and a solution – New World Notes

I’ve always believed the fundamental problem is that Meta leadership never truly understood the Metaverse, and simply treated it like a 3D version of Facebook. In interviews for the book, it also became clear to me that most of the people working on Horizon Worlds weren’t themselves experienced or passionate about virtual worlds. Indeed, in 2022, Meta leadership sent out an internal memo requiring employees to dogfood Horizon Worlds more (i.e. actually play it).

It was actually worse than that, this ex-developer tells me. Required to dogfood their own virtual world, the engineer tells me, many Meta staffers automated their dogfooding: “Before I left they were mandating that employees spend a certain number of hours per week in the game actively playing it. So therein started an automation war where all the people with 200 hours a week never actually played the game once. People just had to launch the game with an Android command over USB, then make sure the proximity sensor on the headset was taped to keep it on.”

Yes: Instead of playing Horizon Worlds, developers of Horizon Worlds at Meta figured out a hack where they could just pretend to do so.