Meta Corporation (formerly Facebook) has made another major adjustment to its "Metaverse" strategy, this time pointing the knife at the office scene it once had high hopes for. According to the latest confirmed news, Meta will officially shut down its virtual reality collaboration platformHorizon Workrooms, and stopped selling related Quest commercial services to enterprise customers, marking a complete collapse of Zuckerberg's vision of "working in a VR headset."
According to its internal announcement, Meta’s “Metaverse Office” business line will come to an end next month:
First of all, Meta’s VR collaboration application Horizon Workrooms will officially cease service on February 16. This application was Meta's core product to showcase the future of office, allowing users wearing Quest headsets to meet and collaborate in the same virtual conference room as avatars. However, despite Meta's vigorous promotion, the product has never been widely adopted by enterprises, and user retention has been sluggish for a long time.
Secondly, hardware and service support for the enterprise market will also be reduced simultaneously. Effective February 20, Meta will no longer sell the Quest headset and accompanying Horizon enterprise service (Quest for Business) to commercial customers. This means that Meta will no longer try to sell VR devices to companies as productivity tools through dedicated commercial channels, but will reposition Quest back to the consumer gaming and entertainment devices it is originally better at.
This decision is not an isolated incident, but part of a recent drastic reorganization of Meta’s entire Reality Labs division. Just this week, Meta announced about 10% layoffs at Reality Labs, closing three first-party VR game studios including Sanzaru Games, Twisted Pixel, and Armature Studio in the process.
Industry analysts believe that this series of moves shows that Meta is trying to withdraw from the quagmire of the "fully immersive metaverse" and shift its strategic focus and funds to the field of AI smart glasses (such as the Ray-Ban Meta series) and wearable devices that are currently more popular and have signs of success.
For enterprise users who had bet on the Meta office ecosystem, this shutdown is undoubtedly a heavy blow. Although Meta announced as early as last year that its traditional enterprise social software Workplace will be closed in 2026, the rapid "disconnection" of the core components of VR office more intuitively declares Meta's complete retreat in the enterprise metaverse market.
With Horizon Workrooms offline, the future of "wearing bulky headsets and meeting face-to-face in the virtual world" no longer seems to be the tomorrow Meta believes in.