Meta discontinues Horizon Worlds VR access as it accelerates shift from metaverse to AI

Meta to Discontinue Key Metaverse Product For VR Headsets

Access to the virtual worlds will continue on the Meta Horizon mobile app. Meta Platforms Inc. said that users of its Quest headsets will lose access to Horizon Worlds, a virtual destination where cartoon versions of people can meet up and play games, marking the latest pullback from a strategy once central to Mark Zuckerberg's vision of a so-called metaverse. Starting June 15, consumers will no longer be able to build, publish or update virtual reality worlds, or access Meta Horizon Worlds on Meta Quest headsets, the company said on Tuesday. Access to the virtual worlds will continue on the Meta Horizon mobile app. The move follows cuts to the team responsible for the headsets and their virtual reality offerings, known as Reality Labs. In January, Meta began eliminating 1,000 jobs from the division, while also closing down some of its virtual-reality game and content studios. Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth, who leads Reality Labs, said in a note to staff at the time that Meta would focus on mobile phone experiences instead of fully immersive virtual worlds accessed via headsets. Zuckerberg's push into the metaverse -- an effort he had so much conviction around that he renamed Facebook as Meta -- has long drawn scrutiny from investors and child safety watchdogs. Just a few years after that rebrand, and sinking billions of dollars into the effort, the company has shifted its spending to the fast-moving artificial intelligence race. At Reality Labs, resources have been diverted from VR gaming to wearable products that advance Zuckerberg's AI ambitions, including the Ray-Ban Meta glasses.

Meta will end Horizon Worlds VR access in June as the metaverse dream keeps fading

Serving tech enthusiasts for over 25 years. TechSpot means tech analysis and advice you can trust. Editor's take: Meta likes to claim that the metaverse dream it spent billions on and believed in so much that it adopted the name isn't dead. But moving its Horizon Worlds app off the Quest store and making it an online-only experience doesn't send positive signals. Meta announced in February that it was making Horizon Worlds, its first attempt at creating a shared immersive VR world that Mark Zuckerberg was once obsessed with, a mobile-only experience. Now, Meta has given a timeline for the move. Horizon Worlds and Events will no longer appear in the Store on Quest from March 31, 2026. Also, the Horizon Central, Events Arena, Kaiju, and Bobber Bay worlds will no longer be available in VR. Anyone who has downloaded the app will be able to use it in VR until June 15, after which point it will stop working in virtual reality. Meta also writes that Hyperscape Capture, a feature it recently introduced in beta that allows Quest headset owners to capture, share, and visit each other in 3D scans of real-life locations, will be removed from Horizon Worlds by March 24. Meta says users will still be able to capture and view Hyperscapes, but sharing, inviting, and co-experiencing Hyperscapes with others will no longer be supported. Meta claims separating VR and Horizon allows the two platforms to grow with greater focus. But the reality is likely an admission that AI has put the final nail in its metaverse plans. It was reported in December that Zuckerberg was planning to slash Reality Labs' budget by 30% as Meta shifted some of its investment from the metaverse group toward AI glasses and wearables. Things got even worse for the group in January, when it was reported that around 1,500 people from Reality Labs, about 10% of its total staff, were being laid off. The vast majority of those losing their jobs were said to be working in the metaverse unit on virtual reality headsets and virtual social networks. The actions appeared justified a few weeks later when Reality Labs posted its worst quarter ever. With losses growing 21% year over year to a massive $6.02 billion, Reality Labs has burned through at least $80 billion since 2020. One has to wonder if Zuckerberg now regrets changing his company's corporate name from Facebook to Meta Platforms.

Meta is killing off the metaverse as it pivots to AI

When Mark Zuckerberg renamed Facebook $META to Meta in 2021, he described the metaverse as "the next frontier." Four and a half years later, the virtual world at the center of that bet is being shut down. Meta announced this week that Horizon Worlds, its social VR platform, will be removed from Quest headsets entirely by June 15. The app will disappear from the Quest store at the end of March. After that, it survives only as a mobile app, repositioned to compete with platforms like Roblox $RBLX and Fortnite rather than to fulfill any vision of a virtual future. The shutdown is the clearest signal yet that the metaverse pivot has been quietly unwound. Horizon Worlds launched in late 2021 and never found its footing. The platform never drew more than a few hundred thousand monthly active users, which isn't enough for a project that consumed billions of dollars. Reality Labs, the Meta division responsible for VR and metaverse development, has accumulated nearly $80 billion in losses since 2020. In the fourth quarter alone it posted an operating loss of more than $6 billion. The costs were always the argument for staying the course. Zuckerberg had promised the metaverse would reach a billion people and generate hundreds of billions in commerce. Pulling back meant admitting those projections were wrong. What changed the calculus was AI. When ChatGPT arrived in late 2022, Meta pivoted its public messaging fast. Its AI research division, long led by scientist Yann LeCun, gave the company a credible foundation to build on. Ad revenue improved. The stock recovered. By 2024, Meta had nearly tripled in value from its 2022 lows. The metaverse, meanwhile, kept bleeding. In January, Meta laid off about 10% of Reality Labs, or about 1,500 people, and shut down several VR game studios. A fitness app called Supernatural, which Meta acquired for $400 million in 2021, has stopped producing new content and has been quietly wound down. Meta is careful to say it has not abandoned VR entirely. In a February blog post, Reality Labs VP of Content Samantha Ryan said the company is "doubling down on the VR developer ecosystem" while shifting Horizon Worlds to mobile. New Quest headsets are still planned. Its Ray-Ban smart glasses, which run on AI rather than virtual worlds, have been a rare hardware success, with Zuckerberg saying recently that sales tripled in the past year. But Horizon Worlds was the flagship, the product that justified the company's new name, the place where Zuckerberg's avatar appeared without legs and became a meme. Its closure marks something more than a product decision.