A party hosted by the EU Foreign Aid department on its own proprietary “metaverse” that cost around ~$400,000 to build reportedly flopped on Tuesday, with almost no one attending.
The Global Gateway Gala, a digital party held within the EU Foreign Aid department’s own proprietary “metaverse” on Tuesday, is said to have been a complete flop, with almost no one attending.
Seemingly mimicking long-standing online social gaming platforms such as Club Penguin and to a lesser extent Mark Zuckerberg’s pet project, Horizon Worlds, the Global Gateway sees players walk around a small digital space as jellybean-like creatures while videos promoting the EU and its values play in the background.
Reportedly unveiled in mid-October, the platform reportedly cost the European Union’s foreign aid department around €387,000 (~$402,000) to build.
However, a bit like Zuckerberg’s own offering, the platform has seemingly failed to take the internet by storm, with POLITICO reporting that a Gala event hosted on Tuesday as being attended only by one news journalist, along with roughly five other people.
To make matters worse, most of those who arrived at the evening party appeared to log off soon after, with the journalist reporting that they soon found themselves alone in the EU’s Great Reset-Esque digital world.
“After initial bemused chats with the roughly five other humans who showed up, I am alone,” Vince Chadwick of Devex reported regarding his experience.
Picture from within the EU’s Global Gateway Metaverse. Credit: Peter Caddle from within Global Gateway
While some digital environments aimed at promoting social interactions between people have proven to be quite popular, such as the now defunct Club Penguin and echidna-infested VRChat, others have proven to be quite expensive wastes of digital real estate.
For instance, Facebook owner Meta’s offering in the business, Horizon Worlds, has proven to be extremely unpopular, with the Verge reporting it as being so buggy that even the company’s own employees are avoiding using it.
Such a failure has been extremely bad news for Meta, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg being forced to lay off over a thousand employees after the company’s stock tanked by over 65 per cent within 12 months.
On the EU front, things do not appear to have improved much since the Global Gateway Gala, with a brief investigation showing that the platform — which is filled with digitised art installations that include a red man and giant trash bag — continues to remain largely empty of users.