Is the Metaverse Dead or Alive?

The Word Itself Has Vanished

Google Trends is funny. Search volume for "metaverse" dropped 92% from its January 2022 peak. The word has basically disappeared from corporate press releases too. Even Zuckerberg started pushing "social AI" from 2025 onward. After renaming his entire company Meta. (You have to admit that's kind of funny.)

So is the metaverse dead? The way I see it, the name died -- the technology is still alive.

What's Definitely Gone

Virtual real estate speculation is done. A plot of land in Decentraland sold for $2.43 million in 2022; the same plot went for about $50,000 in 2025. 98% evaporated. Prices were propped up solely by "I'll sell it to the next person for more" with zero real use value. Collapse was inevitable.

Corporate metaverse offices are gone too. Companies that adopted virtual offices mostly gave up within six months. Against the reality that Zoom is just more convenient, an office where avatars walk around was pointless. Microsoft's AltspaceVR also shut down in 2023. "The future of metaverse offices," they'd said, and it lasted barely two years.

Korean platforms like Zepeto and ifland saw their MAU drop 60-70% from their peaks. Flashy launch events and celebrity collabs weren't enough to keep users around.

But Take Off the Label and a Lot Is Still Alive

Fortnite and Roblox are still growing. Roblox DAU hit 85 million, actually 40% higher than 2022. They just don't call themselves the metaverse. But people meeting in virtual spaces to hang out, trade, and create -- that's fundamentally the metaverse.

VR fitness is a surprise success story. Beat Saber, Supernatural -- user bases keep growing steadily. Found a solid niche in entertainment.

Industrial digital twins are growing too. NVIDIA's Omniverse is actually being used at places like BMW and Siemens. According to McKinsey, the digital twin market hit about $73 billion in 2025, up 35% year-over-year. Not flashy, but creating real value.

I Worked on a VR Project

In 2023, I joined an educational VR content project. Technically solid work. The problem was users found the act of putting on a headset too annoying. Finding it, charging it, wearing it, launching the app -- too much friction.

We pivoted from VR to web-based 3D and participation jumped 5x. (That tells you a lot.) Accessibility matters more than technical polish. No matter how immersive the experience, if it's hard to access, people won't use it.

What Comes Next for the Metaverse

Meta's social AI agents, NVIDIA's AI-powered 3D world generation, Apple Vision Pro's spatial intelligence. Combine these and you get closer to what the original metaverse vision promised. Especially once AI can create virtual spaces from a single text prompt -- that solves the content shortage problem.

This time around, though, it'll probably go toward specific use cases like education, medical training, and manufacturing simulation rather than the grandiose "everyone lives in a virtual world" vision.

The buzzword is dead, but the technology remains. Whether it'll bloom again or quietly stay a niche -- honestly, I'm not sure.