Lego Fortnite. | Image: Epic Games
In 2021, Facebook’s parent company got a new name and a new goal. “Over time, I hope we are seen as a metaverse company,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said at the time. He later called the metaverse “the successor to the mobile internet” and noted that the concept would be so big that it was too much for any one company to take on, spanning an entire industry.
That hasn’t happened yet. Even Meta employees barely use the company’s flagship metaverse app, Horizon Worlds, and over the last few years, Zuckerberg’s definition of the metaverse seems to have shifted from a Ready Player One-style virtual world to one that blends the real and the virtual as new buzzwords like AI have taken root. Either way, this vision of the internet hasn’t exactly…