The Meta Horizon Worlds logo is displayed on a smartphone screen, and the Meta logo is in the background in Chania, Greece, on Aug. 9, 2024.
Nikolas Kokovlis | Nurphoto | Getty Images
Meta announced Tuesday that it is shutting down Horizon Worlds, the virtual reality social network for Quest VR headsets that was once a key piece of the pivot to the metaverse.
In a community blog, Meta announced that the Horizon Worlds app will be taken off the Quest store at the end of March, and fully removed from VR on June 15. After that date, it will only be available on a standalone mobile app.
“We are separating the two platforms so each can grow with greater focus, and the Horizon Worlds platform will become a mobile-only experience,” the company said in announcing the change.
The shift for Horizon Worlds, which was once a central part of the company’s push into virtual reality, comes weeks after Meta cut over 1,000 employees from Reality Labs, the unit responsible for the metaverse.
The January cuts in Reality Labs also hit studios that were working on VR titles, including Ouro Interactive, an in-house studio that debuted in 2023 to build first-party content for Horizon Worlds.
When Meta changed its name from Facebook in October 2021 to cement the pivot to the metaverse, CEO Mark Zuckerberg called it “the next frontier.”
“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,” Zuckerberg wrote at the time when announcing the change.
Horizon Worlds struggled to find users as the general public remained skeptical of virtual reality.
The social platform has never drawn more than a couple hundred thousand active users a month, CNBC previously reported.
The virtual 3D social network where avatars could interact and play games with other users officially launched in late 2021. It operated exclusively on the Quest VR platform until Meta launched a mobile app version in September 2023.
The mobile version of Horizon Worlds was built to provide an entry point for users without VR headsets, functioning similarly to Roblox.
The metaverse has proved to be a costly bet. The Reality Labs unit posted billions in losses each quarter after its launch. In fourth-quarter earnings posted in January, the unit reported an operating loss of $6.02 billion.
Meta has since shifted toward advancing artificial intelligence, scaling back its once-prominent focus on virtual reality.
Meta announced it would restructure its VR efforts last month.
In a February blog post announcing the change, Reality Labs Vice President of Content Samantha Ryan said that Meta would be “doubling down on the VR developer ecosystem while shifting the focus of Worlds to be almost exclusively mobile.”
“By breaking things down into two distinct platforms, we’ll be better able to clearly focus on each,” Ryan said.
