In a year's worth of internal memos obtained by The Verge, Meta’s VP of Metaverse, Vishal Shah, said the team would remain in a “quality lockdown” for the rest of the year to “ensure that it fixes quality gaps and performance issues before opening up Horizon to more users.”

Horizon Worlds lets people build and interact in virtual worlds as legless avatars, sort of like Roblox meets Minecraft, meets a Scotish friday night.

Shah said that since launching late last year, the concept  of a synchronous social network where creators can build engaging worlds had legs.

“But currently feedback from our creators, users, playtesters, and many of us on the team is that the aggregate weight of papercuts, stability issues, and bugs is making it too hard for our community to experience the magic of Horizon. Simply put, for an experience to become delightful and retentive, it must first be usable and well crafted.”

Though Meta has teased its work on more lifelike avatars, the current quality of Horizon’s graphics pales in comparison to some of its non-VR competitors like Fortnite. 

A key issue with Horizon’s development to date, according to Shah’s internal memos, is that the people building it inside Meta appear to not be using it that much.

“For many of us, we don’t spend that much time in Horizon and our dogfooding dashboards show this pretty clearly,” he wrote to employees on September 15th. “Why is that? Why don’t we love the product we’ve built so much that we use it all the time? The simple truth is, if we don’t love it, how can we expect our users to love it?”

In a follow-up memo dated 30 September Shah said a plan was being made to “hold managers accountable” for having their teams use Horizon at least once a week.

“Everyone in this organisation should make it their mission to fall in love with Horizon Worlds. You can’t do that without using it. Get in there. Organise times to do it with your colleagues or friends, in both internal builds but also the public build so you can interact with our community.”

We are not sure if Shah has fallen in love before but we are pretty certain you can't force someone to fall in love if they don't even like you.