Metaverse Statistics 2026: What Actually Happened to It

At 01:21 UTC on 23 September 2026 there were 33 people in Decentraland, across the whole of its genesis city, plus six more spread across its 1,681 user-created worlds. That is not a slow hour. That is the platform.

This page used to say the metaverse had 400 million monthly users and would be worth $996 billion by 2030. The first number had no source; the second was a research firm's projection, and that firm has since halved it. Below is what can be measured in September 2026, from company filings and live APIs, with the date on every figure.

Last checked 23 September 2026.

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Contents

• Top 10 Metaverse Statistics (Editor’s Picks)

• What Meta Has Spent

• The Onchain Metaverse

• Roblox, Which Is Not the Metaverse

• The Hardware Went Sideways

• The Forecasts, Checked

• Nobody Says the Word Any More

• What Could Not Be Sourced

Top 10 Metaverse Statistics (Editor’s Picks)

• Meta's Reality Labs has lost $92.2 billion since 2020, against $12.65 billion of lifetime revenue - about $7.29 lost for every dollar earned.

• Reality Labs made less money in 2025 ($2.207 billion) than it made in 2021 ($2.274 billion). Five years, and revenue went backwards.

• It lost $4.619 billion in the June 2026 quarter alone, on revenue of $431 million.

• Decentraland had 33 concurrent users in its main city on 23 September 2026, and six across all 1,681 of its user-created worlds.

• Decentraland LAND has a $93 floor and did $0.00 of trading in 24 hours; The Sandbox's is $69.

• MANA is down 98.5% and SAND 99.5% from their November 2021 peaks.

• Gartner predicted that by 2026, a quarter of people would spend an hour a day in the metaverse. It is 2026.

• Roblox has 123 million daily users and 29 billion hours a quarter - but it guided bookings down 14-18% for the following quarter, and it calls itself a gaming company.

• VR headset shipments fell 42.8% in 2025 while smart glasses grew 167% year on year in early 2026.

• Searches for “metaverse” are down about 98% from their January 2022 peak.

What Meta Has Spent

Meta renamed itself for this. The segment it renamed itself for has lost $92.2 billion between January 2020 and June 2026, and earned $12.65 billion across the same period.

The single most damning figure is not the loss. It is this: Reality Labs' revenue in 2025 was $2.207 billion, below the $2.274 billion it made in 2021. Four years of spending, and the business is smaller than when it started. In the quarter to 30 June 2026 it took $431 million and lost $4.619 billion.

The product direction has moved with the money. Meta said in February 2026 it is “going all-in on mobile” and shifting Horizon Worlds to be “almost exclusively mobile”, explicitly separating its VR platform from its Worlds platform - and it discontinued Horizon Workrooms, the flagship virtual-office app, on 16 February 2026.

Sources: Meta Platforms investor relations, Meta Horizon OS Developers blog.

The Onchain Metaverse

The crypto metaverse - the one with land you could buy - is measurable in a way that is almost cruel.

• Decentraland: 33 concurrent users in the genesis city and 6 across 1,681 worlds, read live from Decentraland's own API at 01:21 UTC on 23 September 2026.

• Decentraland LAND: a 0.0338 ETH floor ($93), and $0.00 of trading volume in 24 hours. The whole collection - 98,607 parcels held by 8,602 owners - is worth $9.2 million.

• The Sandbox LAND: a 0.0249 ETH floor ($69), with 24-hour volume under one cent. 282,419 parcels, 25,539 owners, $19.5 million for the lot.

• MANA trades at $0.0876, down 98.5% from $5.85 in November 2021. SAND trades at $0.0435, down 99.5% from $8.40.

For context on those land prices: at the 2021-22 peak, single parcels in both worlds sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars, and the two projects were valued in the billions.

Sources: Decentraland Places API, CoinGecko.

Roblox, Which Is Not the Metaverse

Roblox is the platform most often held up as proof the metaverse is thriving, so it is worth being precise about what it is.

• 123 million daily active users, up 10% year on year, in the June 2026 quarter.

• Over 29 billion hours engaged in that quarter, up 5%.

• 27 million average monthly unique payers - against 123 million daily users. Bookings per daily user are about $0.14.

• 35% of its users are under 13, 38% are 13-17 and 27% are over 18.

• Q3 2026 bookings were guided down 14-18% year on year.

And Roblox's own framing: it targets 10% of an approximately $200 billion global gaming market, and says nearly 4% of global gaming revenue already runs through it. It measures itself against games, not against a virtual world. Counting its users as “metaverse users” is how the 400 million and 600 million figures on other pages are manufactured.

Sources: Roblox Q2 2026 shareholder letter.

The Hardware Went Sideways

The headset market did not grow into the metaverse; it was overtaken by a different product. VR headset shipments fell 42.8% in 2025, while the wider XR market grew 211.2% - because of glasses, not headsets.

IDC's 2026 forecast: 3.2 million mixed-reality headsets against about 13.6 million smart glasses. In the first quarter of 2026, smart glasses shipped about 2.25 million units, up 167% year on year, with Meta holding 69.2% of that category.

Meta is winning the hardware category that is growing. It is just not the immersive one it spent $92 billion on.

Sources: IDC trackers.

The Forecasts, Checked

Statistics pages about the metaverse were built almost entirely on projections. Four years on, those projections have deadlines that have arrived.

• Gartner, February 2022: by 2026, 25% of people will spend at least an hour a day in the metaverse. It is September 2026. Nothing resembling this happened, and Gartner has not published a reconciliation.

• The old version of this page: a $996 billion market by 2030, with 2 billion monthly users. The firm behind that family of forecasts now projects $507.8 billion for 2030 - roughly half - and $150.1 billion for 2026.

• “Analysts do not expect the metaverse to have a profitable year before 2026.” Reality Labs lost $4.6 billion in the June 2026 quarter.

This is the argument for dating every forecast you publish. A projection that cannot be checked against an outturn is marketing; one that can be checked usually should be.

Sources: Gartner, Statista Market Insights.

Nobody Says the Word Any More

Searches for “metaverse” peaked at about 1.04 million a month in January 2022 and are about 17,600 now - down roughly 98%.

The companies dropped it too, and their filings show exactly when. The word “metaverse” appears 18 times in Meta's 2021 annual report, 36 in 2022, 33 in 2023, 18 in 2024 and 9 in 2025 - while “AI” went from 0 to 133. In the Q2 2026 quarterly filing it appears seven times, all in risk-factor boilerplate and none in the discussion of results. Mark Zuckerberg's quote in that quarter's earnings release is entirely about AI and does not mention the metaverse at all.

Apple never used the word: its Vision Pro page is headlined “the era of spatial computing is here”, and “metaverse” appears zero times.

Sources: Meta SEC filings, Apple.

What Could Not Be Sourced

From the old page, deleted rather than updated:

• “400 million active monthly users interacting with the metaverse.” No origin. It appears to be Roblox and Fortnite user counts added together and relabelled.

• “The metaverse is currently valued at $22.79 billion.” A market-model output presented as a measurement.

• “The metaverse uses more than 130,000 servers, and IBM estimates that must rise 1,000-fold.” No such estimate can be found.

• “155 million minutes of metaverse video on YouTube generating $6 million in ad revenue.” No method, no source.

• “Meta has invested more than $36 billion.” Understated by half even when written; the audited figure is $92.2 billion of operating losses.

• “At its peak, metaverse was searched roughly 25 million times a month.” The measured peak is about 1.04 million.

Conclusion

The metaverse as it was sold in 2021 - a persistent 3D world where a quarter of us would spend an hour a day - did not arrive, and the numbers that say so are not ambiguous: $92.2 billion of losses against revenue that went backwards, 33 people in Decentraland, land floors under $100, searches down 98%, and the word itself disappearing from the filings of the company that renamed itself after it.

What did arrive is smaller and more specific. 123 million people a day use Roblox, mostly to play games. Smart glasses are selling in the millions, mostly to take photographs and talk to an assistant. Both are real businesses. Neither is the metaverse, and the statistics pages that count them as one are the reason this subject is still quoted at 400 million users.