Metas Horizon Worlds metaverse app is so buggy, Meta employees even refuse to use it

Meta 's VR social network Horizon Worlds , the company's flagship metaverse app , is plagued with quality issues and not used regularly by even the team behind it, according to a leaked internal document.

In an internal document sent to employees on September 15, Meta's vice president of Metaverse, Vishal Shah, said the team would continue to "lock down quality" for the rest of the year, a measure to ensure that Meta addresses quality gaps and performance issues before rolling Horizon out to more users.

Horizon Worlds lets people build and interact in virtual worlds using a legless avatar. To be fair, Horizon Worlds looks like a cross between Roblox and Minecraft. It was a major initiative after CEO Mark Zuckerberg changed the company's name from Facebook to Meta. Meta now spends billions of dollars a year on developing the metaverse.

Horizon Worlds launched on Meta's Quest VR headset last December. It hit 300,000 users earlier this year and is expected to be available on mobile and desktop via a web version soon. However, Shah mentioned in an internal document that the web version could be delayed.

According to Vishal Shah, the user experience on Horizon Worlds is being severely damaged by performance issues as well as annoying bugs. "The issues are making it difficult for the user community to experience the magic of Horizon. Simply put, for an experience to be enjoyable and memorable, it must first be usable and of good quality ," Shah shared.

Despite the improvements, it's clear that Horizon Worlds' current graphics quality is inferior to some of its competitors like Fortnite. Mark Zuckerberg himself was ridiculed after sharing painfully ugly avatars of himself in Horizon Worlds.

In fact, even the staff responsible for developing Horizon Worlds did not want to use the platform because of too many problems. Meta's directors had to call on employees to love their product more, use it more/

“Many of us don’t spend as much time on Horizon Worlds as we should. Why is that? Why don’t we love the product we’ve built so much that we can use it all the time? The simple truth is, if we don’t love it, how can we expect our users to love it?” Shah wrote in a document sent on September 15.

In an internal document sent on September 30, Shah said Meta employees haven't been using Horizon Worlds long enough, so a plan is being put in place to hold managers accountable for pushing their teams to use Horizon Worlds at least once a week.

“Everyone in this department should make it their mission to love Horizon Worlds. You can't build it if you don't use it. Open it up. Make time to experience it with your colleagues or friends in both internal builds and public builds so you can engage with our community,” Shah wrote.

Despite the internal issues, Meta spokesperson Ashley Zandy said her company is confident that the metaverse is the future of computing and should be built around people. Zandy added that Meta is always improving quality and acting on feedback from the creator community. This is a multi-year journey, and Meta will continue to make what they build better.