Meta Is Effectively Killing Horizon Worlds VR, Then Partially Walked It Back

In 2021, Mark Zuckerberg renamed his company Meta, declared the metaverse "the next frontier," and promised it would reach a billion people within a decade. This week, Meta announced it's pulling Horizon Worlds from Quest VR headsets. Then, one day later, it partially reversed that.  But neither version of this story is good for the metaverse.

The end of Meta's Horizon World

What Happened

On Tuesday, Meta told Horizon Worlds users the platform would be removed from the Quest Store by March 31 and fully shut down in VR by June 15. It would survive as a mobile-only experience.

The day after, their CTO walked it back on Instagram, saying existing games would remain available in VR "for the foreseeable future" following fan pushback. But the fine print matters, because now there is no new worlds, no new games, no major investment. Some popular VR spaces, including Horizon Central and Events Arena, still come down. So the situation now is that Horizon Worlds VR isn't being deleted immediately, but it's also not being maintained.

80 billion dollars in loss

The Metaverse was something Meta once declared as their flagship product, but since then, it has only been downhill for the American company. Reality Labs, which oversees the metaverse, has accumulated nearly $80 billion in losses since 2020, including a $6.02 billion operating loss in Q4 2024 alone. In January 2026, over 1,000 employees were cut from the division. Despite all of it, Horizon Worlds never grew beyond a few hundred thousand monthly active users. In contrast, Roblox has hundreds of millions of users.  And VRChat, which was built on a fraction of Meta's budget, has been able to maintain a more engaged community. Similarly, Reports also emerged that some Meta employees were automating fake playtime to hit internal usage targets.

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How It Got Here

Zuckerberg paid $2 billion for Oculus back in 2014, genuinely believing VR would eventually do to smartphones what smartphones did to desktop computers. Following the pandemic, the idea briefly felt less crazy. By October 2021, he had renamed the company and the industry started taking it seriously, too. More so, McKinsey put out a report projecting $5 trillion in metaverse value by 2030. Disney hired a chief metaverse officer. All of this had a real momentum.

Then Horizon Worlds launched with buggy environments and avatars that were literally just floating torsos for an extended period. The platform never found a compelling reason to exist beyond the novelty of the headset. Even the most successful VR apps never came close to validating the scale Zuckerberg described.

Where Meta Is Now

The company has now redirected its ambitions toward AI, forecasting at least $115 billion in spending this year, primarily on that. At a developer conference in September last year, Zuckerberg mentioned the metaverse twice and AI 23 times. The Ray-Ban smart glasses are now Meta's most talked-about hardware, practical and affordable in a way the Quest headsets never were for mainstream users.