For the tens of billions of dollars spent on metaverses, what's come out has been pathetic. Decentraland, Voxels, and Horizon look like video games from 1990. There are people running around saying this can't be done. They're wrong.

I've written a metaverse client that yields GTA V graphics quality and frame rate for a big virtual world. Talks to Open Simulator and Second Life servers. A small number of users are testing it. It's a long way from feature complete, but the graphics part is working nicely. Users need a midrange gamer PC (NVidia 1060 or better, at least 6 CPUs). This is a reasonably difficult problem, but it's not impossible.

Tim Sweeney, the CEO of Epic, says that the 600 million people using game virtual worlds should hold an online wake for the metaverse. He means Fortnite and Roblox users.
The metaverse is alive and well for gamers. But it's not headed for Facebook/Twitter scale.

So what went wrong? The NFT clown car, and Zuckerberg, went wrong.

The NFT guys are all Make Money Fast. Most of them never even shipped a virtual world.
That didn't stop them from collecting money from suckers. Slowly, at the rate of about one every few weeks, the SEC is bringing the hammer down on those guys.[1]
The ones who shipped something just slapped something together and called it a metaverse. If you haven't visited Decentraland, check it out. It's 1990s graphics quality. It's also empty; it runs about 260 concurrent users.

The whole Meta fiasco, and its motivations, has been covered elsewhere.

So what are the real problems?

First, the metaverse is boring. If you build a good virtual world, it's about as interesting as real life. Most forms of entertainment have an interesting event density about 10x to 100x that of real life. Metaverses don't. You have to make your own fun. Second Life has this problem. It's fun for people who
are into building, creating, and exploring. It's not fun for people who want to be passively entertained. This limits the market.

The game-derived metaverses, Fortnite and Roblox, are games with social areas on the side. Fortnite discovered that by accident. Their game has rounds of play, and you have to wait for the next cycle to start. So they have a "lobby". People hanging out in the lobby to socialize became a thing, and they built on that to allow users to have social spaces.

Second, there are technical problems. Metaverses need to look as good and play as well as AAA title games. This is quite possible, but not on a $99 WalMart laptop or a phone. "Cloud rendering", as with
Google Stadia (closed), Vortex (closed), and NVidia GeForce Now (still around but the price keeps going up) is an option, but the economics don't work out. Nobody can do free to play with cloud rendering.
Metaverses on a current gamer PC can work quite well, but most people don't have those.

Third, there's the VR nausea problem. If you put people in a VR environment where they can move freely but the visual world is not rigidly locked to the real world at all times, about 5% - 15% of the population becomes nauseated. VRchat shows that there's a market for this anyway, but it's about 22,000 concurrent users. The only real stat in this business is how many people are logged on right now, measured from outside the system. All other numbers can be "adjusted".

Fourth, there's really no role for "brands" in the metaverse. Despite all the hype, no real world brand has had any significant success in the metaverse. These are game worlds. A branch of Sotheby's or Hermes does not make sense. Also, showing fashion items in worlds with crap graphics just devalues the brand.

So, it's a niche. Right now, there are seven games on Steam with over 100,000 users logged in.
That's probably the size of the metaverse market.

[1] https://www.sec.gov/spotlight/cybersecurity-enforcement-acti...