Meta has (very) big goals for their Horizon Worlds platform. She plans to open it to teenagers next month.
Currently, only adults over the age of 18 can sign up for Meta Horizon Worlds, but according to The Wall Street Journal, that could change very soon. The American giant would indeed like to open up its social virtual reality experience to young people aged 13 to 17 from March in order to expand its user base and improve retention. The magazine says it received the information in a memo titled “Horizon 2023 Goals and Strategy,”in which Gabriel Aul, VP of Virtual Reality Experiences at Meta, outlined goals for the first half of 2023.
Meta has (very) big goals for its Horizon Worlds platform
In a memo, Gabriel Aul wrote that these young users are “true digital citizens of the metaverse”and that Meta must consider them if Horizon is to succeed. Meta spokesman Joe Osborne told the newspaper that “teens are already spending a lot of time in all sorts of VR adventures on the Quest, and [the company wants to] make sure [it] can offer them that as well.”in Horizon Worlds with age-appropriate tools and protection.”
Joe Osborne did not elaborate on what options he would offer to protect young users. In 2021, The Journal reported that company researchers concluded that Instagram was “unsafe for a significant percentage”of teenage boys, especially teenage girls. As a result, Meta has suspended development of Instagram for kids and introduced several safety measures for teens. It also now restricts sensitive content to new users under the age of 16.
She is reportedly planning to open it to teens as early as next month.
In addition to welcoming young teenagers to Horizon, Meta wants to increase its monthly active users from 500,000 to 200,000 during the first half of the year. And the giant is aiming for a 20% retention rate. According to reports, Horizon’s retention rate was 11% in January, which means that only 1 in 9 users return to this virtual experience next month. Meta hopes to achieve these goals by improving the reliability and performance of the service and fixing existing bugs.
Menlo Park would also like to publish 20 new Horizon apps developed by third-party studios to reach more users. In addition, he apparently hopes to make virtual gaming more accessible by launching a web version for mobile and desktop next June. Meta has also teased this web experience in the past, but the company failed to launch it last year as originally planned. This year, the giant not only hopes to launch the web version of Horizon in a few months, but also wants to have 150,000 monthly cross-screen users in the first half of 2023.