The Meta Horizon World logo appears on a smartphone screen with the Meta logo in the background on August 9, 2024 in Chania, Greece.
Nicholas Cocobris | Null Photo | Getty Images
meta announced Tuesday that it is shutting down Horizon Worlds, the virtual reality social network for the Quest VR headset that was once the keystone to the Metaverse.
Meta announced on its community blog that the Horizon Worlds app will be removed from the Quest store at the end of March and completely removed from VR on June 15th. After that date, it will only be available as a standalone mobile app.
In announcing the changes, the company said, “We are separating the two platforms to allow each to focus more on growth, and the Horizon Worlds platform will be a mobile-only experience.”
The move to Horizon World, once the centerpiece of the company’s virtual reality efforts, comes weeks after Meta cut more than 1,000 employees from Reality Labs, the division responsible for the Metaverse.
Reality Labs’ January layoffs also hit studios that were working on VR titles, including Ouro Interactive, an in-house studio that debuted in 2023 to build first-party content for Horizon Worlds.
When Meta changed its name from Facebook in October 2021 to solidify its focus on the Metaverse, CEO Mark Zuckerberg called it the “next frontier.”
“Over the next 10 years, we hope the Metaverse will reach a billion people, host hundreds of billions of dollars in digital commerce, and support the work of millions of creators and developers,” Zuckerberg wrote at the time when he announced the changes.
Horizon Worlds struggled to find users as the general public remained skeptical of virtual reality.
CNBC previously reported that the social platform has never attracted more than a few hundred thousand monthly active users.
The virtual 3D social network, where avatars can interact with other users and play games, was officially launched in late 2021. It operated exclusively on the Quest VR platform until Meta launched its mobile app version in September 2023.
The mobile version of Horizon Worlds is built to provide an entry point for users without a VR headset and functions similarly to Horizon Worlds. roblox.
The Metaverse turned out to be an expensive gamble. Since its launch, the Reality Labs division has posted billions of dollars in losses every quarter. In its fourth quarter results released in January, the division reported an operating loss of $6.02 billion.
Since then, Meta has pivoted toward advances in artificial intelligence and scaled back its once-prominent focus on virtual reality.
Meta announced last month that it was restructuring its VR efforts.
In a February blog post announcing the change, Samantha Ryan, vice president of content at Reality Labs, said Meta “doubles down on the VR developer ecosystem while shifting Worlds’ focus almost exclusively to mobile.”
“Splitting things up into two different platforms allows us to have a clear focus on each platform,” Ryan said.
