The image will remain a metaphor for an entire era. In 2022, Laurent Bainier was editor-in-chief of 20 Minutes and head of the 20 Mint project , our Web3 section. One evening, he found himself alone in an empty open-plan office, pressing the space bar on his keyboard to make his avatar dance in the metaverse for the launch of our issue distributed in cyberspace . It was 2022, the height of the craze. “For me, the metaverse was an intellectual exercise. I was asking myself: what if society changed?” he recalls today. That same year, the Gartner firm estimated that one in four people would spend at least an hour a day in the metaverse by 2026. Here we are, and it’s clear that the metaverse hasn’t revolutionized our daily lives.
And this isn’t just a 20 Minutes story . Since its creation in late 2020, Reality Labs, Meta ‘s division dedicated to virtual worlds and virtual reality, has swallowed up more than $83 billion in cumulative operating losses. In January, Meta officially announced its strategic withdrawal : 1,500 layoffs, the closure of several VR game studios, and the end of Horizon Workrooms, the virtual office intended to replace Zoom and Teams. Yet, in 2022, not a week went by without a major French brand announcing its entry into “virtual worlds.” Carrefour was building a presence on The Sandbox. LVMH presented its avatar “Livi” and immersive augmented reality experiences at VivaTech. France Télévisions, Havas, Casino, Axa… according to Stratégies magazine , practically all the major names in the CAC 40 had their own metaverse project.
A peak of attention followed by disinterest
Today, these groups did not respond to our interview requests. Is this proof that there’s nothing left to say about the metaverse? The platforms themselves are faltering. Since 2022, the price of virtual land on Decentraland has plummeted, from a peak of $3,820 to $9.40 today. “What’s dead is the narrative of the mainstream metaverse as the next social platform,” summarizes Charles Perez, a lecturer and researcher at the Paris School of Business and author of the book * The Metaverse Is Dead* . For him, this outcome was predictable. Technology follows the Gartner curve, with a peak of attention overestimating its actual impact, followed by a trough of disinterest: “This trough was expected. It is now confirmed by market signals.”
How did we get here? For Charles Perez, the blame lies primarily with our imagination. “The most unrealistic expectation was that of mass adoption of VR [virtual reality] for everyday use,” he criticizes. The metaverse requires a desktop computer or a dedicated headset. Even for home use, neither battery life, weight, nor price convinced the average household. The meteoric rise of ChatGPT starting in late 2022 did the rest: in a few weeks, the media, investors, and the general public had a new, significantly more accessible toy. “There has been a major shift in the metaverse toward AI ,” confirms Laurent Bainier, now editor-in-chief of The Conversation. “That’s where the money is going, that’s where new uses are being sought. Practices are becoming more widespread with AI, and that’s what the metaverse lacked.”
The consumer metaverse is over; welcome to the industrial metaverse.
But the metaverse, after its premature demise, has already been reborn. The global XR (extended reality, which encompasses virtual, augmented, and mixed reality) market continues to grow. “75% of Fortune 500 companies have adopted VR for training, with a 35% to 50% reduction in security incidents,” says Charles Perez. “That’s where the real value is flowing.” The metaverse promised a blend of Roblox and Ready Player One . But it’s in factories and hospitals that its promise is being fulfilled. The market for digital twins—virtual replicas of real objects or systems used for monitoring and testing—was estimated at $14.47 billion in 2024, according to Kings Research .
What if the next game-changer came not from a helmet, but from a pair of glasses? The latest Ray-Ban Meta, launched in September 2025 , represent, according to the researcher, “the strongest driver of mass adoption”: discreet, portable, and integrated into our daily lives. “Glasses don’t lock us into a separate reality. That’s the very condition for mass adoption,” believes Charles Perez. In short: the metaverse is dead, long live the metaverse.
