Meta has announced it will shut down Horizon Worlds, the virtual reality social network for Quest VR headsets, which was previously a key piece in the transition to the metaverse, according to CNBC.
According to the owner of Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram, the Horizon Worlds app will be removed from the Quest store at the end of March and completely removed from virtual reality on June 15th. The app will remain available, but only as a standalone mobile application.
““We are separating the two platforms so each can grow with greater focus, and the Horizon Worlds platform will become a mobile-only experience,” said Meta.
Horizon Worlds represented a central part of the company’s investment in virtual reality; however, in January, Meta laid off more than a thousand employees from Reality Labs, the unit responsible for the metaverse. The cuts at Reality Labs also affected studios working on virtual reality titles, including Ouro Interactive, an internal studio created in 2023 to generate its own content for Horizon Worlds. The goals of the company’s founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, to consolidate the transition to the metaverse became clear when he changed the name of Facebook to Meta in October 2021.
Zuckerberg called it “the next frontier” and predicted 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.”
Mark Zuckerberg’s vision did not translate into public acceptance, and Horizon Worlds struggled to find users. The platform never attracted more than a few hundred thousand active users per month.
The investment in the metaverse was an expensive gamble. Reality Labs suffered successive losses of billions. In January, the unit announced an operating loss of R$6.02 billion.
Meta’s recent focus has shifted away from virtual reality and towards artificial intelligence solutions. Reality Labs’ Vice President of Content, Samantha Ryan, wrote on the company blog that Meta would be “doubling down on the VR developer ecosystem while shifting the focus of Worlds to be almost exclusively mobile.” Ryan added that “By breaking things down into two distinct platforms, we’ll be better able to clearly focus on each.”
