Meta to revamp Horizon Metaverse app, plans to open for teen use as soon as Mar

The new strategy includes opening up Horizon to teens aged 13 to 17, the memo says. The app is currently available to people 18 and older. A teen launch for Horizon could happen as soon as March, according to people familiar with the matter.

In the memo, titled “Horizon 2023 Goals and Strategy," Meta Vice President of Horizon Gabriel Aul outlines the team’s objectives for the first half of 2023, with the top task being to improve user retention, particularly among teens and young adults. These are the generations that in many ways will be the true digital citizens of the metaverse and have grown up seamlessly interfacing with the technology and connecting with people remotely, Mr. Aul wrote.

“Today our competitors are doing a much better job meeting the unique needs of these cohorts," Mr. Aul said in the memo, which was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. “For Horizon to succeed we need to ensure that we serve this cohort first and foremost."

Meta’s Quest virtual-reality headsets were designed for people aged 13 and up, so it makes sense that the company would plan to introduce experiences for that audience in Horizon, Meta spokesman Joe Osborne said.

“Teens are already spending time in a variety of VR experiences on Quest, and we want to ensure that we can provide them with a great experience in Horizon Worlds as well, with age-appropriate tools and protections in place,“ Mr. Osborne said.

Meta has spent billions of dollars building out the metaverse, which is a vision for the internet in which users interact in virtual worlds. In 2022 alone, the company spent $15.9 billion in cost and expenses for its Reality Labs division, the unit tasked with building the hardware and software necessary for the metaverse. Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg has said he views the metaverse as the next frontier for computing technology.

Among Horizon’s biggest problems is its inability to keep users. Players download the game on their Quest virtual-reality headsets, try it out and fail to find any experiences or fellow gamers that motivate them to return, according to people familiar with the matter. Horizon’s weekly retention rate sat at 11% in January, meaning that only about one in nine users play again the following month, the people said. The company has made it a goal to increase that figure to 20%, according to the memo.

Improving retention is crucial for Meta. More players help light up the service’s various worlds and keep them from feeling like ghost towns, people familiar with the matter said. Returning players are also important so that social communities that will draw players back into the service can be built, these people said.

Besides improving retention, Meta has also tasked the team with growing Horizon’s user base. The company has set 500,000 monthly active users as the unit’s goal for the first half of 2023, with 1 million as the goal for the full year, according to the memo. The current figure is just above 200,000, below the late-December peak, the people said, reached following the holiday season when many consumers purchased new Quest headsets and played with them while on break from school and work.

As part of this push for growth, the company has set goals for the Horizon team to improve the reliability of the service and maintain high performance. The team went into lockdown in October after many users complained about a high number of bugs affecting the user experience, according to documents reviewed by the Journal.

The team has also been given the goal of ensuring that Horizon provides a safe and equitable experience, the memo said. This goal is particularly important and coincides with the team’s push to attract teens and young adults.

Meta has previously experienced blowback over zeroing in on young users with some of its other services. The company paused its effort to build an Instagram for children in 2021 after the Journal reported that Meta’s own internal research showed that its Instagram service was toxic for some teen girls. Instagram has done extensive work around bullying, suicide and self-injury and eating disorders to help make the app a safe place for all users, the company said in response to the report at the time.

Meta has identified working with outside studios to build new worlds and experiences for Horizon as a vital part of its strategy for improving user growth and retention, according to the memo.

The company has asked the team to launch at least 20 new Horizon experiences built by second-party studios, with the goal of having five become medium hits and at least one a major hit, according to the memo.

Meta has worked with second-party studios previously. Among those is a partnership with the NBA called “NBA Arena in Meta Horizon Worlds," which is a virtual world where Horizon users watch NBA content on a big virtual screen, shoot free throws or have dunk contests.

The company is also pushing the team to expand Horizon beyond virtual reality.

Meta wants the Horizon team to launch a so-called 2-D version of the metaverse that can run on mobile and desktops, according to the memo. The company has previously talked about bringing Horizon to these types of devices. Meta missed its initial goal of launching this version by the end of 2022, and the new target is the first half of 2023, according to the memo.

The company is also pushing for more integration between Horizon and other services within Meta’s family of apps, which include Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. Mr. Zuckerberg talked about this last week during the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call, saying that already more than 100 million people have created avatars on WhatsApp.

“I thought that was an interesting example of how the Family of Apps and metaverse visions come together," he said. “Even though most of our Reality Labs investment is going towards future computing platforms—glasses, headsets and the software to run them—as the technology develops, most people are going to experience the metaverse for the first time on phones and then start building up their digital identities across our apps."

The company has set a goal of 150,000 monthly cross-screen Horizon users by the end of the first half of 2023, according to the memo.