Meta introduced this week that it’s pulling the plug on the digital actuality model of Horizon Worlds, the platform that was as soon as the centerpiece of Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse wager.
Beginning June 15, customers will now not have the ability to construct, publish, or replace VR worlds, or entry Meta Horizon Worlds on Meta Quest headsets, in response to Meta’s announcement.
The platform will survive solely as a standalone cell app.
It’s a exceptional finish for a challenge that prompted Zuckerberg to rename his whole firm.
When Meta modified its title from Fb in October 2021, Zuckerberg referred to as the metaverse “the following frontier,” writing: “Our hope is that throughout the subsequent decade, the metaverse will attain a billion folks, host lots of of billions of {dollars} of digital commerce, and assist jobs for hundreds of thousands of creators and builders.”
Properly, that didn’t go the best way he deliberate. In his video again then saying the metaverse, which I compelled myself to observe, Zuckerberg got here off a bit lizard-like,
You may watch his whole keynote presentation under, if you need slightly blast from the previous:
What’s going away, and when
By March 31, Horizon Worlds and Occasions will disappear from the Quest Retailer, and Meta’s personal showcase worlds — Horizon Central, Occasions Enviornment, Kaiju, and Bobber Bay — will go darkish in VR, in response to Meta’s announcement.
Horizon-specific Meta Horizon Plus perks, together with Meta Credit, Digital Clothes, and In-World Purchases, may even be faraway from the subscription.
Customers who’ve already downloaded Horizon Worlds can hold taking part in in VR till June 15, after which the app will probably be faraway from Quest totally.
This week’s announcement wasn’t the primary shoe to drop.
In February, Meta completely shut down Horizon Workrooms — the VR assembly platform pitched to workplace staff as a substitute for Zoom — and deleted all person knowledge. The corporate additionally stopped promoting business Quest headsets and stopped accepting new clients for its Quest for Enterprise program, in response to a enterprise affect evaluation by Snazzy Options.
The January Actuality Labs layoffs minimize over 1,000 staff and shuttered VR studios, together with Ouro Interactive, an in-house studio inbuilt 2023 particularly to create first-party Horizon Worlds content material, in response to Bloomberg.
The invoice comes due
Actuality Labs misplaced $19.19 billion in 2025 alone, bringing cumulative losses since 2020 to $83.6 billion, in response to Meta’s This autumn and full-year 2025 earnings report.
Samantha Ryan, Meta’s VP of content material at Actuality Labs, framed the shutdown as a “doubling down” reasonably than a retreat, saying in a February weblog submit that Meta could be “doubling down on the VR developer ecosystem whereas shifting the main focus of Worlds to be virtually solely cell.”
“By breaking issues down into two distinct platforms, we’ll be higher capable of clearly deal with every,” she added.
Ryan additionally insisted that Meta stays dedicated to VR. She stated that Meta was nonetheless “the only largest investor within the VR business” and nonetheless believed in VR “as a important know-how on the trail to the following computing platform.”
An unattainable promote for enterprise
The failure of Horizon Workrooms, Meta’s enterprise VR assembly platform, was totally predictable.
For those who’re in a Zoom assembly, you’ll be able to examine your electronic mail, pull up your calendar, share your display, use a whiteboard, and entry recordings and transcripts. Everybody already has Zoom put in. Everybody already has a digicam.
If you wish to maintain that very same assembly in VR, you first want to seek out your headset. Cost it. Obtain no matter updates have gathered. Keep in mind easy methods to use it. Determine easy methods to share the assembly invite. Be certain all of your co-workers have their tools. Educate no less than one among them easy methods to use theirs.
Then, when you’re truly within the assembly, the screens are arduous to learn. You don’t have quick access to your desktop apps. Typing is troublesome or unattainable. You may’t examine your cellphone if one thing pressing is available in.
It’s not sensible for 99.9 p.c of enterprise use circumstances.
I’ve actually tried to do work in VR. I actually have. I’ve tried to tug my workforce members in. I’ve even given out free headsets. It’s a really arduous promote. There’s actually no upside to doing work in VR. It’s all draw back..
And for the uncommon case the place VR would possibly make sense — say, reviewing a bodily product mockup with a distributed workforce — you’d need to add that mockup to Meta’s servers. Meta would have entry to each dialogue about it, each doc associated to it, each inside element of your product improvement course of. For any firm severe about mental property, that alone is a dealbreaker.
That is what Horizon Workrooms by no means solved. The patron model had the identical issues. Wagner James Au, a longtime digital worlds journalist, instructed The American Prospect that Horizon Worlds didn’t get “the social side proper,” noting that “these are digital communities they usually should be welcoming. They should have folks you wish to hang around with within the expertise.”
What Second Life and OpenSim acquired proper — type of
In the meantime, Second Life, which launched in 2003, earlier than the iPhone existed, continues to be operating.
So are lots of of OpenSim grids, a lot of them operated by volunteers on a shoestring finances. The hypergrid, a community of interconnected OpenSim worlds the place avatars can teleport between grids whereas preserving their look, belongings, and good friend lists, was by no means going to lose $19 billion in a single yr. It additionally was by no means going to get shut down by a quarterly earnings name.
The distinction with Meta is stark. Second Life’s digital financial system strikes roughly $650 million per yr, and Linden Lab has paid out $1.1 billion to creators over the platform’s lifetime — 14 of whom grew to become millionaires from promoting digital trend and actual property, in response to an evaluation of the platform’s historical past by recreation developer Philip Ludington.
Meta, by comparability, by no means constructed a functioning creator financial system. Whereas Second Life customers retain copyright to their content material, Meta Horizon Worlds gave Meta sole management over content material and utilization rights. It was a closed ecosystem run by a single entity.
The income break up made issues worse. When Meta examined in-app purchases, creators acquired solely 52.5 p.c of pre-tax income after platform charges. Philip Rosedale — now CTO of Linden Lab, and Second Life’s unique founder — referred to as Meta’s charge construction self-defeating, telling PC Gamer: “It looks like an effective way to dissuade creators from truly taking part in its financial system, however frankly I might count on nothing much less from them.” He famous on the time that Linden Lab had paid out $86 million to Second Life creators in a single yr.
Second Life’s magic sauce was not its know-how.
Meta thought higher graphics and VR immersion would assist it succeed. Sansar thought VR-native design would do it. Excessive Constancy thought next-gen infrastructure would do it. Decentraland thought blockchain possession would do it. None of it labored, as a result of Second Life’s benefit isn’t know-how however reasonably 23 years of gathered tradition, financial infrastructure, and relationships constructed inside a shared world, says Ludington.
OpenSim has one thing even tougher to duplicate: it’s totally open supply, decentralized, and owned by nobody. No company board can resolve to close it down. No quarterly earnings report can kill it. It’s extra like the best way the Web works, and why I’m an enormous fan. And in addition why I’ve been writing about OpenSim for the previous 17 years.
Personally, I feel a closed metaverse isn’t the best way to go.
What Meta is shutting down, and what’s staying
Quite a lot of headlines this week stated “Meta kills its metaverse.” Together with mine. That’s the way you get the clicks, proper?
However that’s not fairly the complete image.
Shutting down in VR:
Horizon Worlds — however simply the VR model: Gone from the Quest Retailer by March 31; the app itself faraway from all Quest headsets on June 15, in response to Meta’s announcement.
Horizon Workrooms: Meta’s VR workplace assembly platform shut down in February, with all person knowledge deleted, in response to PC Gamer.
Quest for Enterprise: Meta stopped promoting business Quest headsets and accepting new enterprise clients in February, in response to PC Gamer.
Meta’s personal first-party VR content material: Meta acknowledged in its developer weblog that 86 p.c of the time Quest customers spend of their headsets is already with third-party apps — that means its personal content material was largely irrelevant to how folks truly used the system. The corporate has now closed three in-house VR studios totally.
The Horizon Feed and Worlds button in Quest’s interface: The headset’s new Navigator UI boots to a grid of put in apps, with the Horizon social feed eliminated, in response to Engadget.
Nonetheless accessible:
Quest headsets: Nonetheless being offered. Meta says it has “a sturdy roadmap of future VR headsets that will probably be tailor-made to completely different viewers segments,” in response to its developer weblog. A next-generation gaming headset is in improvement, in response to Tom’s Information.
Third-party VR video games: Beat Saber, Superhot VR, Gorilla Tag, and 1000’s of others stay totally accessible on Quest. Meta says it invested almost $150 million in VR developer packages in 2025 and that new releases together with Exhausting Bullet, The Thrill of the Struggle 2, and UG every earned hundreds of thousands in income, in response to Meta’s developer weblog.
Horizon Worlds as a cell app: Survives on iOS and Android, repositioned as a Roblox-style cell recreation platform. Meta says it grew cell month-to-month lively customers greater than 4 instances over in 2025, and that 4 cell creators hit $1 million in lifetime income, in response to the developer weblog.
