Meta abandons metaverse vision as Horizon Worlds pivots to mobile-first strategy

Meta's metaverse leaves virtual reality | TechCrunch

Meta has announced a major update for its immersive virtual world, Horizon Worlds, on Thursday that will see it leave the metaverse behind. The tech giant said it's shifting focus for Horizons Worlds to be "almost exclusively mobile" and that it's "explicitly separating" its Quest VR platform from the virtual world. Meta's Reality Labs division for VR and smart glasses development has lost nearly $80 billion since 2020. The update to Horizon Worlds, and other recent moves, signal that Meta is significantly rethinking its VR ambitions. Last month, the company reportedly laid off roughly 1,500 employees from its Reality Labs division -- about 10% of the unit's staff -- and shut down several VR game studios. Additionally, it was reported that the VR fitness app Supernatural, which Meta acquired in 2023, will no longer produce new content and will move into "maintenance mode." Horizon Worlds originally launched in 2021 as a VR platform and later rolled out to the web and mobile. Meta said Thursday that to "truly change the game and tap into a much larger market, we're going all-in on mobile." By going mobile-first, Horizon Worlds is positioning itself to compete with popular platforms like Roblox and Fortnite. "We're in a strong position to deliver synchronous social games at scale, thanks to our unique ability to connect those games with billions of people on the world's biggest social networks," Samantha Ryan, Reality Labs' VP of content, said in a blog post. "You saw this strategy start to unfold in 2025, and now, it's our main focus." Ryan went on to note that Meta is still focused on VR hardware. "We have a robust roadmap of future VR headsets that will be tailored to different audience segments as the market grows and matures," Ryan wrote. Meta's metaverse ambitions have effectively been abandoned in favor of AI. After shifting its Reality Labs investments away from the metaverse, Meta is now focused on developing AI wearables and advancing its own AI models. During Meta's latest earnings call last month, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, "It's hard to imagine a world in several years where most glasses that people wear aren't AI glasses." The exec also stated that sales of Meta's glasses tripled within the last year, calling them "some of the fastest growing consumer electronics in history."

Meta's VR metaverse is ditching VR

Meta, after laying off about 10 percent of its Reality Labs division, closing three VR studios, stopping new content for VR fitness app Supernatural, and discontinuing its metaverse for work, is announcing a major change for its Horizon Worlds metaverse platform. Instead of attempting to make the 3D social platform work for both VR and mobile, Meta is "explicitly separating" its "Quest VR platform from our Worlds platform" and "shifting the focus of Worlds to be almost exclusively mobile," Samantha Ryan, Reality Labs' VP of content, says in a blog post. The new approach sets Meta up to better compete with platforms like Roblox and Fortnite, which also offer user-generated experiences that can be played on your phone. Horizon Worlds originally launched for VR, but "to truly change the game and tap into a much larger market, we're going all-in on mobile." "We're in a strong position to deliver synchronous social games at scale, thanks to our unique ability to connect those games with billions of people on the world's biggest social networks," Ryan says. "You saw this strategy start to unfold in 2025, and now, it's our main focus." As for VR software, Ryan says Meta is focusing on supporting third-party developers. "While we're proud of the world-class work from Oculus Studios over the years, among 1P and 3P apps, 86% of the effective time people spend in their VR headsets is with third-party apps." But Meta is still planning to make VR hardware; "we have a robust roadmap of future VR headsets that will be tailored to different audience segments as the market grows and matures," according to Ryan. (That new hardware, which could include a new mainline Quest headset, might cost a higher price.) Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth made similar comments about Meta's shift in strategy in a recent episode of the Access podcast, which is hosted by former Verge staffer Alex Heath. After the not-so-successful bet on the metaverse, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg now sees AI as the new social media, a vision that could include AI-generated games that users can share with others on their feeds. "There are 3D versions of that, and there are 2D versions of that and Horizon, I think, fits very well with the kind of immersive 3D version of that," Zuckerberg said on the company's latest earnings call.