Turns Out Meta Isn't Shutting Down 'Horizon Worlds' in VR After All

Meta has pulled a 180 on its flagship metaverse app. On Tuesday, the company announced the date it planned to shut down virtual hangspace Horizon Worlds. Then late yesterday, the company announced it will actually keep Worlds open to VR users "for the foreseeable future." In an Instagram story, Meta's CTO Andrew Bosworth said, "We decided, just today in fact, that we will keep Horizon Worlds working in VR for existing games, to support the fans who have reached out."

According to Bosworth, Meta won't be working on any new VR games within Worlds, but the current content will still be around for VR users. "People who already have games they like, that they're using in Horizon Worlds, will be able to download the Horizon Worlds app and use it in VR for the foreseeable future," Bosworth said.

While Worlds will remain open to VR users, Meta is focusing on mobile users. Any new Meta-made content will be geared toward users on their phones. "Most of our energy is going toward mobile," Bosworth said, "because that's where most of the consumer and creator energy already was."

Meta initially revealed its plan to shut down Horizon Worlds to VR in February, then announced concrete plans to pull the plug on Tuesday.

A shaky future for the metaverse

Putting its flagship metaverse app in maintenance mode for VR users is a huge turnaround for a company that rebranded itself as "Meta." CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled both the name change and Horizon Worlds itself at his company's Connect event in 2021, touting the metaverse as "a successor to the mobile internet" that would eventually host over a billion people. That's not how things have worked out: Meta's Reality Labs division, of which Horizon Worlds is a part, has burned through an estimated $83.55 billion since 2021, and Meta has since slashed jobs at the division, cutting loose departments devoted to first-party VR game and fitness content.

At its peak, Horizon Worlds reportedly had only 200,000 monthly users. For comparison, Roblox has 381 million monthly users. But it's nice that Meta is at least keeping the lights on for that relatively small number of fans. There might not be as many as Meta would like, but there are definitely passionate members of the Worlds community, who will now still be able to gather in their VR spaces.

Headsets are out; smart glasses are in

Even though Meta has recently reiterated its commitment to supporting third-party VR developers and promised "a robust roadmap of future VR headsets," the company is clearly focusing on AI and smart glasses moving forward. Its scaling back of Worlds and other first-party Meta VR content reveals where the market is: Unlike the Quest line of headsets, Meta's AI-powered smart glasses have proven an unqualified success for the company, which reportedly plans to manufacture 20 million pairs of smart glasses in 2026. "Face computers" that interact with and augment the world we actually live in are more popular than headsets that transport us to other worlds.

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