According to an Instagram post from Meta’s CTO, Andrew Bosworth, Meta is not ending VR support for Horizon Worlds after all, which should come as a huge relief to the five or so people.
“In fact, we made the decision today to keep Horizon Worlds running in VR,” Bosworth said as part of a Q&A on Instagram Stories after fans of the app contacted him to say they were “heartbroken” about the decision.
A Meta spokesperson confirmed Bosworth’s comments to TechCrunch.
Meta announced earlier this year that it would no longer support social Metaverse apps on its Quest virtual reality headset, a major concession for an app that Meta once envisioned as the centerpiece of socialization in VR. As it turned out, very few people actually wanted to play with VR. On Tuesday, Meta confirmed on a community forum that Horizon Worlds would be moving to web and mobile only on June 15th, but that announcement was quickly retracted.
Even if Horizon Worlds will still be accessible via Quest, the fact that Meta was planning to shut it down is proof enough that the Metaverse, or at least what was imagined in VR, has turned out to be a black hole where Reality Labs’ money has disappeared. That division of Meta has lost $73 billion since 2021, when Meta rebranded from Facebook. As I previously pointed out, to spend that much money you would have to spend $1 million a day for 200 years. (Reality Labs has also booked spending on some AI research as well as augmented reality products such as smart glasses.)
According to technology market intelligence firm IDC, sales of Meta’s Quest headset are down 16% year over year from 2024 to 2025, making it unlikely that the hardware will meaningfully compete with smartphones. Meta is not alone in its struggle to make virtual reality appealing. Apple had to scale back production of its $3,500 Vision Pro headset due to low demand.
In response to this decline, Meta made significant layoffs in its Reality Labs division in January, impacting more than 1,500 employees and closing several game studios. Rumor has it that Meta is considering even larger layoffs, which could affect 20% of the company.
Meta will continue to support Horizon Worlds on Quest headsets, but the company still plans to prioritize the mobile experience. Bosworth said in a podcast with journalist Alex Heath that Horizon shifted its focus to mobile because it was a better product-market fit.
“We have a much larger audience on mobile and it’s been very well received on mobile,” Bosworth said of the app. “[The team] You have to build everything twice. Build it once for mobile and build it again for VR. There is a very easy way to increase their velocity. It’s the same as having it built for mobile. ”
Mobile intelligence firm Appfigures told TechCrunch that the Horizon Worlds mobile app has had a total of 45 million downloads worldwide across iOS and Google Play, with 1.5 million downloads expected by 2026. This is a 53% year-over-year increase compared to last year, when the Horizon Worlds app had approximately 983,000 downloads at this time.
However, Appfigures estimates that the total amount consumers have spent on the app is just $1.1 million, a pittance compared to the size of Meta’s investment in the Metaverse.
Bosworth is correct in pointing out that Horizon Worlds has a bigger opportunity on mobile than on the Quest headset, but it will take more consumer spending on the app for Meta to prove it’s worth the investment.
Source link
