Meta employees reportedly not supportive of Zuckerberg's metaverse

With just a day to go until Meta announces its next VR headset, it sounds like some of the company’s employees aren’t too enthusiastic about the whole “metaverse”thing.

In a wide-ranging New York Timesreport about Meta’s direction in the leadup to its 2022 Meta Connectevent, there were some juicy, little nuggets regarding how Meta employees feel about the company’s push towards a mixed-reality future. One source, for instance, said the company’s significant metaverse expenditures made them “sick to [their] stomach.” Meta lost $10 billionon VR investments in 2021.

SEE ALSO: What to expect at Meta Connect 2022 (and what we know about the Meta Quest Pro)

The hits don’t stop there.

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Only 58 percent of the respondents to a Meta employee survey conducted by Blind, an anonymous professional forum, said they understood CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse ambitions. One anecdote in the Times report said employees were pushed to use the in-house Horizon WorldsVR app for team meetings earlier this year. It turned out that a bunch of employees either didn’t have VR headsets yet or hadn’t gotten them up and running.

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The company’s chief metaverse exec Vishal Shah even wrote an internal company post noting that not enough employees use Horizon Worlds and that the app would undergo extensive quality control changes through the rest of 2022, per The Verge. Perhaps most damningly, some employees reportedly refer to Meta’s VR-chasing as “M.M.H.,” or “make Mark happy,” referring to the CEO’s personal metaverse ambitions that are apparently driving the company’s efforts in that department.

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• What to expect at Meta Connect 2022 (and what we know about the Meta Quest Pro)
• A leaked video of the Meta Quest Pro hints at what's next for VR headsets

SEE ALSO: How to watch the Meta Connect livestream for the Quest Pro announcement

Despite any negative coverage around Meta’s VR shift, it’d be unwise to think the direction will change anytime soon. Meta is set to debut its next headset, tentatively dubbed Quest Pro, on Tuesday. And regardless of the popular backlashto the visual style of Horizon Worlds (and Zuckerberg’s defenseagainst the backlash), there are no reasons to believe Meta will stop investing time and money into developing the app.

Maybe all of these investments will work out in the end for Meta. Or maybe stories about employee dissatisfaction in the face of tumbling stock prices will continue to drop.