Meta set 2023 goals for its teams working on Horizon, including more than doubling its active userbase and creating at least one major hit experience on the platform, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal.

The report by Salvador Rodriguez referenced a memo and “people familiar with the matter” in outlining Meta’s goals and strategy for Horizon. Meta’s Vice President in charge of the effort is targeting improving the retention of teens and young adults as they “will be the true digital citizens of the metaverse,” according to the report. The strategy also includes specific targets, such as 500,000 monthly active users in Horizon in the first half of 2023 and improving the weekly retention rate from 11 percent to 20 percent.

Meta also aims to launch the flat-screen version of the Horizon service in the first half of 2023, according to the report.

Meta is a company in transition as CEO Mark Zuckerberg plans a “year of efficiency” for 2023 after laying off 11,000 workers last year. Last week, news broke that Echo VR, one of VR’s earliest sports acquired by Meta in 2020, would be shut down by August. During the same week, Meta won approval for its acquisition of VR fitness app Supernatural, becoming the latest VR-focused development studio to join the tech giant ahead of the release later this year of Meta’s next consumer VR headset.

We’ll be curious to see whether Meta can achieve any of these goals. Launching a flat version of Horizon, for example, should lead to dramatically different controller and interaction experiences across devices. It could be pretty challenging to push that goal at the same time Meta aims to maximize retention with must-have experiences in Horizon.

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