The word metaverse did not originate in a corporate rebrand, a product roadmap, or a quarterly earnings call. It entered our cultural vocabulary in 1992, in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, as a speculative description of the future of virtual worlds.

More than three decades later, we find ourselves in a deeply distorted moment: large segments of the media continue to conflate Meta’s internal product struggles (most visibly Horizon Worlds) with the success or failure of the metaverse itself. This is not just inaccurate. It is actively harmful to the broader community of professionals working in XR.

As Director of the Virtual Worlds Museum, an institution dedicated to preserving and contextualizing the history of virtual worlds across platforms, I feel compelled to address this confusion directly.

The Hijacking of a Term

When Facebook rebranded itself as “Meta”, it did something subtle but powerful: it implied ownership over a concept that was never singular to one company. Through repetition, news media headlines reinforced the idea that Meta was building the metaverse.

After rebranding from Facebook, it strategically positioned itself as the central reference point for the metaverse. By adopting the name itself, aligning executive messaging around a singular long-term vision, integrating metaverse language across its hardware and platforms, and promoting polished speculative “visuals”, Meta shaped public perception that it was building the metaverse rather than participating in a broader ecosystem. Media dynamics amplified this framing, repeatedly treating Meta as a proxy for an entire medium. While Meta never formally owned the metaverse, these combined actions contributed to a widespread and misleading conflation of one company’s trajectory with the success or failure of a multi-decade, multi-stakeholder field.

This framing ignored decades of work by metaverse platforms such as Second Life, VRChat, Roblox, and Fortnite which are all directly inspired by Snow Crash. Alongside; Active Worlds, There, Habbo, Minecraft, Spatial, Rec Room, VR Land, SpatialArrival.Space, FrameVR,  Resonite, Engage XR, and many, many more.

Hundreds of platforms, each with different architectures, communities, affordances, and cultural norms, have collectively advanced what the metaverse actually is: a continuum of shared virtual spaces, not a single destination (at least not yet).

When Horizon Worlds struggled to find product-market fit, the headlines became “the metaverse is failing.” That conclusion is as flawed as it is lazy.

An Analogy the Media Would Never Accept, Yet Routinely Applies

Imagine if a journalist declared that “the internet failed” because Google+ shut down.
Or if Gmail renamed itself “Email” and then failed (others would follow).
Or that “email is dead” because one company’s messaging app lost users.
Or that “cinema doesn’t work” because a single studio released a box-office bomb.
Or if that “basketball is dead” because the NBA went bankrupt (college, high school, International would still thrive, and other organizations would emerge to take its place).
We would rightly reject those conclusions as absurd.
Yet this is precisely the logic being applied to the metaverse.
Meta’s Horizon Worlds is a platform. The metaverse is a category, a cultural trajectory, and an ecosystem. Confusing the two is like mistaking AOL for the internet or assuming that because Netscape lost the browser wars, the web itself was a failure.

Why This Matters

This misrepresentation has real consequences:

  • Investors become skittish about funding genuinely innovative XR projects.
  • Creators and world builders are discouraged, their work overshadowed by a narrative they did not author.
  • Researchers and educators struggle to communicate the long arc of virtual world development.
  • The public is misled into believing an entire medium has been “debunked.”

Most damaging of all, it erases the contributions of independent builders, open communities, and non-corporate experiments that have carried virtual worlds forward for decades… often with far fewer resources and sometimes more imagination.

“The metaverse is the next expression of the internet: real-time and three-dimensional,” noted Tony Parisi, 3D graphics pioneer and author of The Seven Rules of the Metaverse. “To confuse and conflate that with any one type of hardware, let alone any single company, misses the point. The technology and protocols that power the Internet are continually being upgraded to power immersive virtual worlds, digital twins, and all manner of works of the imagination. The metaverse is alive and well.”

The Metaverse Is Larger Than Any Single Company

The metaverse is not a product launch.
It is not a headset.
It is not a quarterly KPI.

It is an evolving layer of human experience that is shaped by platforms, technologists, communities, networks, world builders, creators, and inhabitants across generations.

Meta may succeed or fail on its own terms. That is a legitimate business story. But to continue framing that outcome as a referendum on the metaverse itself is a profound category error.

To be clear, this is not an attempt to disparage Meta or diminish its contributions. On the contrary, I am deeply grateful for the company’s leadership, long-term investment, and tangible support of the XR ecosystem. Many of my colleagues and members of the broader creator community have directly benefited from access to hardware, education, mentorship, funding, and professional networks through initiatives such as Oculus Launch Pad and the Start programs. I have personally worked as a contractor on Meta’s Avatars team alongside extraordinarily talented and thoughtful professionals who are doing their very best within a complex and evolving organization. Like any company operating at Meta’s scale, there are legitimate challenges and critiques related to privacy, algorithms, ethics, and the human cost of large-scale layoffs. However, this post is not an evaluation of Meta’s successes or failures. It is a critique of media behavior, specifically the repeated use of reductive and click-driven headlines that conflate one company’s internal outcomes with an entire medium, often without historical context or basic due diligence. The metaverse deserves more careful language, and the public deserves better reporting.

Author and Virtual Worlds Museum advisor Wagner James Au has observed that major virtual world platforms, including Roblox, have continued to expand despite cyclical narratives of decline.

In reflecting on his research, Au notes that when his book Making a Metaverse That Matters was published in 2023, he was tracking approximately 500 million monthly active participants across multiple metaverse platforms. By the time he completed the afterword in 2025, that figure had grown to roughly 700 million monthly active participants, underscoring sustained growth across the broader ecosystem rather than contraction.

A Call for Better Language and Better Journalism

The XR field deserves more precise terminology, more historical awareness, and more responsible reporting.

At the Virtual Worlds Museum, our mission is to preserve this lineage and show that today’s virtual worlds did not appear overnight, and they certainly did not originate in a single corporate vision deck.

The metaverse did not fail. Meta attempted to enter a long-running story and struggled to lead it. Those are not the same thing and the media owes it to the public, and to the creators building these worlds, to stop pretending they are.

Conclusion and Invitation to Journalists

In closing, my intent is not merely to critique existing narratives, but to actively contribute to better ones. I believe journalists covering immersive technologies, virtual worlds, and the metaverse face a difficult challenge in navigating a rapidly evolving landscape that spans decades of history, multiple industries, and diverse communities. I want to be a constructive resource in that process.

To that end, I am committed to helping journalists by providing credible references, historical context, and curated research materials that can support more accurate, nuanced, and responsible reporting. Below, I will include a list of resources that may be useful for future coverage, including archives, research initiatives, community organizations, and historical timelines. My hope is that these materials can help shift coverage away from oversimplification and toward a deeper understanding of the medium as a whole. Journalists are welcome to reach out via LinkedIn. I am happy to help connect you with knowledgeable sources and relevant historical context on the subject.

Here is one recent example of a headline that illustrates how the term metaverse is often used loosely in technology coverage, from 1/19/26: “Well, there goes the metaverse!”

There are countless other examples on the web. Here’s another example from three years ago by Ed Zitron that incorrectly claimed that the metaverse was a descendant of Tron

Resources for the Metaverse-Curious

For journalists interested in deeper historical grounding and ecosystem-level context, we offer links to many metaverse books on our website, and the following references offer a starting point for more informed exploration. These include the ongoing Timeline of XR curated by Avi Bar-Zeev, which traces the evolution of immersive language and concepts over time, as well as the Teleportal developed by our team at the Virtual Worlds Museum, an interactive map and gateway that presents virtual world platforms as a connected ecosystem rather than isolated products.

Long form analysis such as Making a Metaverse That Matters by Wagner James Au situates contemporary platforms like Roblox and Fortnite within a lineage that stretches back to Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash and early virtual worlds such as Second Life, while frameworks like The Seven Rules of the Metaverse by Tony Parisi provide structural principles for understanding how interoperable virtual worlds will possibly function in the future. Richard A. Bartle’s Designing Virtual Worlds Volume 1, offers journalists essential historical and design context for understanding how virtual worlds function, evolve, and persist beyond short-term media narratives.

The Preserving Virtual Worlds initiative (2010), led by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in partnership with institutions including the University of Maryland, Stanford University, and Linden Lab under the Library of Congress’s National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program, explored methods for safeguarding early video games, interactive fiction, and networked virtual environments such as Second Life to ensure their long term accessibility and cultural value.

Additional perspective can be found in peer-reviewed whitepapers and articles published by IEEE, alongside the work of industry and volunteer-driven organizations such as MetaTr@versal, which focuses on portal crawls between worlds, standards, and cooperation across platforms, and the XR Guild, whose library and programming support ethical practicethrough education, mentoring, and advocacy. Finally, recorded talks and panels from Immersive X and Augmented World Expo offer direct insight into how practitioners, researchers, and builders across the field are actively shaping the present and future of immersive media. Together, these sources reflect a living body of knowledge that extends well beyond any single company narrative and can meaningfully inform more accurate and responsible reporting.

Acknowledgment of Ecosystem Contributors

It is also important to recognize the many organizations and communities that continue to move the immersive ecosystem forward in thoughtful and principled ways, often with limited funding and little media visibility. Many of these groups operate largely through volunteer labor, shared stewardship, and a genuine commitment to ethical development, education, and community building.

I would like to express sincere appreciation for the metaverse platforms, professionals, and organizations such as  Virtual World Society, Metaverse Standards Forum, AWE XR, XRSI, XR Association, XR Women, Academy of Immersive Arts and Sciences, Immersive X, Realitycraft, VRARA, AUREA Award, OMI Group, VRM, RP1, VWEC, BurnerSphere, Steve Van Loon, Evo Heyning, Carlos Austin, Ben Erwin, Karen Alexander, Julie Smithson, Robin Moulder, Avi Bar-Zeev (XR Guild), KZero, Terry Schussler, Jacki Morie, Alvin Wang, Cause + Christi XR, Paige Dansigner, Keram Malicki-Sanchez, Ryan Schultz, Dr. Bruce Damer, Jason Moore, Neil Trevett, Gabe Baker, Chris Madsen, Alison Morano, Andy Fidel, Dr. Ruth Diaz, Met@Traversal, along with many others (impossible to name all) working quietly but persistently to support creators, researchers, developers, and educators.

This partial list of organizations, world builders, and communities fosters collaboration, preserves institutional memory, mentors new voices, and advocates for responsible practices across XR, virtual worlds, and immersive media.

Their efforts represent the connective tissue of the ecosystem. While they may not generate headlines or quarterly earnings reports, they play a vital role in shaping the culture, ethics, and long-term resilience of this medium. Greater awareness and acknowledgment of their work would meaningfully improve public understanding of how progress in this space actually occurs.

Julian Reyes is Director of the Virtual Worlds Museum.