On July 3, The Nation ran an article in which journalist-critic Kate Wagner wrote about the “catastrophic failure of the Metaverse,” arguing it “should serve firstly as a [sic] overdue humiliation and secondly as a wakeup call… [that] the tech industry in its current iteration... will not provide anything of lasting value or of considerable productiveness to society.” Per Wagner, the Metaverse’s largest platform, Decentraland, had only 38 daily active users (DAU) on a day in October 2022, and “one of the features designed to reward users in Meta’s flagship product Horizon Worlds produced no more than $470 in revenue globally.” For dramatic effect, Wagner reiterates: “Thirty-eight active users. Four hundred and seventy dollars. You’re not reading those numbers wrong.”

But Wagner’s claims about Horizon Worlds’ revenue are extremely misleading, and simple to falsify. Wagner refers only to “[one] of the features” that generate revenue in Horizon Worlds, which allows users to tip creators, and which may indeed have only generated $470 to date. But you would have to be extremely unfamiliar with tech and product, in general, to assume that tipping is the only revenue stream Meta has built for Horizon Worlds, which is again its flagship metaverse offering. For example, another feature in Horizon Worlds that serves as a revenue stream is “In-World Payments” which brought in $10,000 in October, as was reported by WSJ.