Meta announced that it will officially stop access to its metaverse platform Horizon Worlds through VR headsets in June this year, marking that the "metaverse dream" that the social giant once made a high-profile bet on has further receded into the background, and artificial intelligence is becoming the new focus of the company's resource investment. In February of this year, Meta stated that it would transform Horizon Worlds, which Mark Zuckerberg once regarded as the first important attempt at an immersive shared virtual world, into a "mobile-only" product.
Meta recently gave a specific timetable: starting from March 31, 2026, Horizon Worlds and Horizon Events will no longer appear in the Quest App Store, and users will no longer be able to obtain the application through the Quest Store. At the same time, major virtual worlds such as Horizon Central, Events Arena, Kaiju and Bobber Bay will no longer be open to VR users. For users who have previously downloaded the Horizon Worlds app, Meta will allow continued access through VR until June 15, when the app’s functionality in virtual reality will cease completely.
In addition to product removal, Meta also announced that it will remove the Hyperscape Capture feature previously launched in the testing phase. This feature allows Quest headset users to 3D scan real-life scenes and capture, share and access these "Hyperscape" spaces with each other within Horizon Worlds. The company said that in the future, users will still be able to capture and view locally, but the ability to share, invite others to join, and experience Hyperscape together will be turned off.
In the official statement, Meta said that "separating VR and Horizon platforms" will help both parties develop in a more focused manner. However, the outside world generally interprets this move as a fact that the metaverse strategy represented by Horizon Worlds has basically given way to the current hot artificial intelligence business.
As early as December last year, there were reports that Zuckerberg planned to cut about 30% of the budget of Meta's Reality Labs department and shift some of the investment from this business group responsible for the metaverse and hardware to new directions such as AI glasses and wearable devices. In January this year, Reality Labs was hit hard again. It was reported that about 1,500 employees in the department were laid off, accounting for about 10% of its total number of employees. The vast majority of them were from the Metaverse team responsible for VR headsets and virtual social networks.
In terms of financial performance, Reality Labs' situation is also not optimistic. The latest financial report shows that the department recorded the "worst quarterly" performance since its establishment. The quarterly loss expanded 21% year-on-year to US$6.02 billion. The cumulative loss since 2020 has reached at least US$80 billion. Against this background, the industry began to question whether Zuckerberg's major decision to change the company's name from "Facebook" to "Meta Platforms" was still reasonable.
As Horizon Worlds withdraws from the VR stage and the experience is compressed to the mobile terminal, Meta’s narrative about the “immersive metaverse” is being weakened by reality, while AI-related products and services have become a new focus in the capital market and internal resource allocation within the company. In the foreseeable future, it is becoming increasingly uncertain whether Meta will have large-scale new investments in the metaverse.