I'd like to see the "metaverse" happen. So would many others. There's work going on in multiple directions. We're getting there technically. As a business, not so much.
There's Second Life, still plugging away. Content looks great, runs slow because the system is not parallel enough internally. Those guys need about a dozen really good C++ programmers and some people who know how to make distributed stuff that isn't web go fast. The original devs are long gone and the current ones are overwhelmed by the legacy code. Usage is up 5% or so since everybody had to shelter in place. About 55,000 concurrent users on a good day, comparable to GTA V Online. All in one persistent world built mostly by the users. Second Life is profitable but Linden Lab blew a lot of money on the CEO's pet project, Sansar, which flopped. A quick overview of SL by a user: [0]
There's a crowd of "blockchain" worlds - Decentraland, Sominum Space, Sandbox. They're about 80% land speculation and 20% virtual world. Mostly, I suspect, so that their internal currency is considered a "utility token" by the SEC, rather than an unregistered public offering.
Tim Sweeney, Epic's CEO, has been making "metaverse" noises since 2017. But, over the last three years, his vision has shrunk. Early plans read like Ready Player One. By this spring, it's only being able to teleport you and your friends from Minecraft to Fortnite as a group. He used to talk about an open metaverse where anyone could build. If someone did that, the margins would be like those of a hosting service.
The whole Improbable/Spatial OS thing seems to have gone bust. They built a back end for big virtual worlds with about $500M of VC money. (Softbank, who else? [1]) They were supposedly valued around $2BN at peak. It sort of works, but the terms are awful - you have to run on Google's cloud, under Google's thumb, at high pay per use rates. No major game company has taken that deal, and the three minor companies that did games for it went bust. 2019 revenue, $1.5M.
There were the "game level loaders" - you log in, you pick a game map, you play in a prebuilt virtual world. High Fidelity (went bust), Sansar (sold to somebody in Marin who buys distressed companies), and SineSpace (limping along, user count in 2 digits). All could be very pretty, but were not that compelling. You can't do much in there.
Headset VR, as John Carmack says, isn't going anywhere until the headgear gets down to swim goggle size. Even then, a sizable fraction of the population can't stand an immersive VR world where your sense of motion and the motion you're seeing are very different. There's a reason that the most successful VR game is Beat Saber, where the real and virtual worlds stay locked together while you slash at approaching objects. This is a big problem with getting to a Metaverse.
Facebook did Facebook Spaces, which flopped. Its replacement, Facebook Horizons, was supposed to have launched by now, but hasn't been mentioned in months.
Ball, the VC, claims Disney should be the power player in this, with games as extensions of the movie franchises. You can read his article series as to why. Movie franchise games have been successful, but they're usually tied closely to a canned story line, which is not the Metaverse.
So right now we don't quite have the technology and don't have a killer app, but what's out there is interesting and useful.
[0] https://youtu.be/H3Z49MOG_xU
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-09/softbank-...