Meta moves away from metaverse, announces end of VR platform Horizon Worlds

Meta has announced it will shut down the virtual reality social network Horizon Worlds for its VR headsets as the company moves away from its broader metaverse strategy.

The company said on Tuesday in a community blog that Horizon Worlds will be removed from the Quest VR store starting March 31 and fully discontinued on VR by June 15. The company stated, “We are separating the two platforms so each can grow with greater focus, and the Horizon Worlds platform will become a mobile-only experience.”

Horizon Worlds was a central part of Meta’s push into virtual reality and the metaverse. The announcement comes after the company cut more than 1,000 jobs in January from Reality Labs, the unit responsible for its VR and metaverse efforts. The layoffs represented about a 10 percent reduction in Meta’s VR department.

Reality Labs has reported billions of dollars in losses each quarter since the metaverse initiative began. The company’s January fourth-quarter earnings showed an operating loss of more than $6 billion. Those ongoing losses may be contributing to Meta’s recent shift toward artificial intelligence, as the company announced last month that it would restructure its VR efforts.

The move marks a setback in Meta’s long-term push into VR technology. When Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the company’s rebrand to Meta in 2021, he emphasized the importance of the metaverse, saying at the time, “Our hope is that within the next decade, the metaverse will reach a billion people, host hundreds of billions of dollars of digital commerce, and support jobs for millions of creators and developers.”

Horizon Worlds launched in late 2021 and initially operated exclusively on Quest VR devices before expanding to mobile in 2023. The platform struggled to attract a broad user base and was largely used by younger audiences. According to CNBC, the platform had only a few hundred thousand active users per month.

Per Wired, Meta poured billions of dollars into the platform and partnered with brands and artists such as Coldplay and Imagine Dragons. Despite the investment, the platform was taken over by children, who the outlet noted "are not the most stable or profitable user base." 

Mike Proulx, vice president and research director at market research firm Forrester, told the outlet, "Meta’s pivot on Horizon Worlds is the predicted and inevitable outcome of a big, risky bet that never found an audience. Meta was trying to solve for a consumer problem that doesn’t exist. You can’t build a mass social platform reliant on hardware most people neither own nor want to wear for more than short bursts."

"Advertisers follow their target audiences," Proulx said. "And those audiences were never inside Horizon Worlds."