People don't go to virtual spaces because they want to compulsively buy things, they want entertainment and social interaction. The more "buy this! buy that!" you shoehorn into a platform that is hardly ready for even normal gaming experiences is not going to take off imo.

Roblox is terrible but they worked out the model a little bit more intelligently. Make an engine where it's free to join, host experiences and create new ones relatively easily. They have a shop where virtual items can be bought and sold and Roblox takes a major cut of virtual currency to real currency and store transactions, but outside of that their involvement within the games themselves is less pronounced.

Even if I don't play Roblox myself, it's popular with kids and this platform I think is more capable of becoming a VR universe than Horizon worlds or other buzzed "Metaverse" implementations.

Even Garry's mod servers have more interesting interactions than Meta's pet project. And I don't trust Meta enough to touch a platform they develop.

It's very difficult to just burst into the mainstream without carving out a niche first, and Meta's Metaverse failed because they couldn't carve out that niche.

Though even if they had tried, the very tech nerds who would be their early adopters already don't trust them because of their shady deals (did anybody say Cambridge Analytica scandel?), so they weren't ever going to fork out money for this.

It died because meta (which everyone still sees as facebook) is a toxic brand, even to the average consumer now.

The Metaverse died because they tried to monetize it before it's even a thing. Buy a virtual plot of land? With crypto and NFTs? Hell no!

VR Chat exists and it, and it's free.

Dear tech developers, if you are listening please put VR projects on the back burner. They are an interesting future technology but the currently possible technology that people would adopt if it were economical to do so is AR. A simple heads up display with an integrated personal assistant has enormous potential in both personal and business uses right now if it was reasonably priced and reliable. You could replace cell phones.