Meta announced Thursday a major update to its immersive virtual world Horizon Worlds, which will leave the Metaverse. The tech giant said it is shifting Horizon Worlds’ focus to be “nearly mobile-only” and has “explicitly separated” the Quest VR platform from the virtual world.
Meta’s VR and smart glasses development division, Reality Labs, has lost nearly $80 billion since 2020. The Horizon Worlds update and other recent moves indicate that Meta is drastically rethinking its VR ambitions.
Last month, the company reportedly laid off about 1,500 employees in its Reality Labs division (about 10% of the division’s staff) and closed several VR game studios. Additionally, it was reported that Supernatural, the VR fitness app that Meta acquired in 2023, will not be producing new content and will be in “maintenance mode.”
Horizon Worlds originally launched as a VR platform in 2021 and has since expanded to web and mobile. “We are fully committed to mobile to truly change the game and tap into a larger market,” Mehta said Thursday.
By going mobile-first, Horizon Worlds is positioning itself to compete with popular platforms like Roblox and Fortnite.
“We are in a strong position to deliver synchronous social games at scale thanks to our unique ability to connect synchronous social games with billions of people on the world’s largest social networks,” Samantha Ryan, vice president of content at Reality Labs, said in a blog post. “We have seen this strategy start to unfold in 2025, and that is our main focus right now.”
Ryan went on to say that Meta remains focused on VR hardware.
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“We have a strong roadmap for future VR headsets that will be tailored to different audience segments as the market grows and matures,” Ryan wrote.
Meta’s Metaverse ambitions were effectively abandoned in favor of AI. After shifting its Reality Labs investment away from Metaverse, Meta is now focused on developing AI wearables and advancing its own AI models.
“It’s hard to imagine a world in a few years where most of the glasses people wear aren’t AI glasses,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during Meta’s latest earnings call last month.
The executive also said sales of Meta’s glasses have tripled within the last year, calling them “some of the fastest-growing consumer electronics products in history.”
