Meta Is Walking Away From the VR Vision That Turned Facebook Into Meta

Meta is abandoning its original vision for a VR-first metaverse. On June 15, the company will shut down Horizon Worlds on Quest headsets to focus on mobile instead, per a post on Meta's community forums. Users will no longer be able to access core hubs like Horizon Central and Events Arena in VR after the cutoff date, though Horizon Worlds will continue as a standalone app on iOS and Android.

The death of Meta's VR metaverse comes after years of major financial hits to Meta's Reality Labs division, which handles VR,AR, and metaverse projects. Meta has invested somewhere between $70 and $80 billion dollars into its metaverse and VR push via the Reality Labs division since 2020; still, Horizon Worlds has never reached mass adoption.

The service attracted only a few hundred thousand monthly users at its peak, far below the scale Meta typically targets. The ...