Meta is closing Horizon Worlds in the Metaverse

Meta Quest announced Tuesday that it is shutting down Horizon Worlds, a virtual reality social network for VR headsets that was once a key part of its pivot to Metaverse.

In a community blog, Meta announced 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.

“We are separating the two platforms so each can grow with greater focus and the Horizon Worlds platform will become a mobile-only experience,” the company said in announcing the change.

The shift to Horizon Worlds, once a central part of the company’s push into virtual reality, comes weeks after Reality Labs, the unit responsible for Metaverse, cut 1,000 jobs.

The January cuts at Reality Labs hit studios working on VR titles, including Auro Interactive, an in-house studio launched in 2023 to produce first-party content for Horizon Worlds.

When Meta changed its name from Facebook in October 2021 to cement the pivot to the Metaverse, CEO Mark Zuckerberg called it “the next frontier.”

“Over the next decade, the Metaverse will reach one billion people, host hundreds of billions of dollars in digital commerce, and support jobs for millions of creators and developers,” Zuckerberg wrote when announcing the change.

Horizon Worlds struggled to find users as the general public was skeptical of virtual reality.

CNBC previously reported that the social platform attracted no more than a couple of hundred thousand active users per month.

The virtual 3D social network, where avatars can interact with other users and play games, was officially launched in late 2021. It will run exclusively on the Quest VR platform until the launch of the Meta mobile app version in September 2023.

The mobile version of Horizon Worlds is built to provide an entry point for users without VR headsets, working similarly. Roblox.

The Metaverse proved to be a costly bet. The Reality Labs unit has posted billions in losses every quarter since its inception. In fourth-quarter earnings posted in January, the unit reported an operating loss of $6.02 billion.

Since then, Meta has shifted toward advancing artificial intelligence, reversing its core focus on virtual reality.

Meta announced last month that it would be restructuring its VR efforts.

In a February blog post announcing the change, Reality Labs vice president of content Samantha Ryan said Meta “will double the size of the VR developer ecosystem and shift Worlds’ focus almost entirely to mobile.”

“By splitting things into two different platforms, we’re able to focus clearly on each,” Ryan said.