Meta has announced a major update for its immersive virtual world, Horizon Worlds, on Thursday that will see it leave the metaverse behind. The tech giant said it’s shifting focus for Horizon Worlds to be “almost exclusively mobile” and that it’s “explicitly separating” its Quest VR platform from the virtual world.
Meta’s enormous bet on virtual reality ended last week, with the company reportedly laying off roughly 1,500 employees from its Reality Labs division — about 10% of the unit’s staff — and shutting down several VR game studios, according to The Wall Street Journal. It’s a huge reversal for a company that, just four years ago, staked its entire identity on the concept.
Meta is laying off about 10 percent of its Reality Labs metaverse division, and the cuts include closing down some of its VR gaming studios. In a statement about the broader Reality Labs layoffs, Clayton said that “We said last month that we were shifting some of our investment from Metaverse toward Wearables. This is part of that effort, and we plan to reinvest the savings to support the growth of wearables this year.”
According to Bloomberg News, Meta is considering slashing its metaverse spending by as much as 30% in 2026 — although no plans are final yet — after meetings at Zuckerberg’s Hawaii compound laid out a slimmer future for its namesake ambitions. For three years, the company tried to brute-force another new reality into existence: new name, new stock ticker, new keynote vocabulary about “presence” and “embodied internet.”
After a period of disillusionment in the industry that some call the metaverse, many of its most fervent believers are banking on Apple to save the day. While an ecosystem of software startups built up around Meta Platforms’ lineup of Quest virtual-reality products, some companies have pulled back recently. Microsoft shut down a social virtual-reality platform it acquired in 2017 and trimmed the team building its HoloLens augmented-reality headset. Walt Disney Co. shuttered the division developing strategies for the metaverse.
“Meta has failed over and over to protect young users,” Sen. Edward Markey of Massachusetts wrote in a tweet(Opens in a new window). “Now, they want to bring more kids as young as 13 onto the metaverse without ensuring their safety. They have to stop.”
Nearly $2bn (£1.75bn) has been spent on virtual land in the past 12 months, as people and companies race to get a foothold in the metaverse, research shows.
But we are years away from the metaverse emerging as a single immersive space online where people can live, work and play in virtual reality. So is the land grab one big gamble?
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