Just under a year ago, Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company he founded as a Harvard student would change its name to Meta. “From now on, we’re going to be metaverse first, not Facebook first,” he said during a virtual keynote at the company’s Connect event.

Zuckerberg has spent the year promoting all things metaverse. He showed off dystopian VR offices, watched VR footage from space with Neil deGrasse Tyson, and convinced more than one professional athlete to play VR games with him. He went to the Joe Rogan podcast to extol the virtues of mixed martial arts Y virtual reality. Rogan even got an early demo of Meta’s new high-end VR headset, launching during Connect.

But the metaverse has also proven to be a huge money pit. In the past year…