(disclaimer: used to work for Facebook) I had similar doubts about the Metaverse concept until recently. However, Meta has done a great job (better than any other company in history) scaling up VR. They've sold more units than the most recent version of Xbox. The Xbox did sell out, which makes demand appear artificially low, however the fact that Quest sales are keeping up with Xbox sales is a very big deal. I didn't realize that until I listened to Mark Zuckerberg's interview on Joe Rogan. If you're an app developer, it's more than worth considering VR given the size of the audience on those platforms. One other thing to keep in mind - the current concept of the metaverse is essentially an alpha version. Now that Meta has established VR as a legit platform, they're using it to usher in a new future. Meta is throwing out lots of ideas for how VR might help reshape the future. The vast majority of those ideas will not work out but many of them will stick and form the foundational principles that underpin the evolving VR ecosystem as people increasingly spend more time. Once the technology passes a certain threshold of maturity, it will be a fundamentally better way to connect with friends/family/coworkers than any other medium. In general, high bandwidth communication mediums dominate with in-person interactions being at the top of the food chain. Meta aspires to make it feel like you're with people in real life except that your social experiences will be augmented with super powers that don't exist in real life. If they achieve that, meeting with in VR/AR will be preferable to real life and we'll all be using VR, as hard as that is to believe. That's not a future that anyone is necessarily asking for but it is a future that many will find more appealing than the existing options offered by computing platforms, like video chat. Assuming that happens, Meta will have a path to creating the new dominant computing platform. That's the ultimate manifestation of the metaverse vision - defining and owning the future of computing. Recall how clunky smartphone and personal computing experiences felt at first. Those devices weren't for everyone...until they were. Now, <15 after the first smartphone (which I define to be a phone on par with the personal computer, so in my mind the first smartphone was really iPhone running iOS 2, which introduced the App Store), people now routinely idle on their smartphones. That is to say, when they're doing nothing else with their hands (even if they're doing something else) it's not uncommon for their to pull out their smartphones. In 2000, if you predicted that grown adults would impulsively pull out what amounts to an entertainment device while they're idling at the airport, grocery store, or even while driving that would have sounded ridiculous. It's important to remind ourselves how quickly technology can become virtually ubiquitous and how challenging it is to predict the impact on our habits.