Meta is reportedly shutting down one of its most ambitious bets. The company announced that Horizon Worlds will be removed from Quest VR headsets, marking a significant shift away from the metaverse-first vision it once championed. Horizon Worlds will be pulled from the Quest Store by the end of March, with full removal from VR set for June 15. After that, the platform won’t disappear entirely—but it will exist only as a mobile app.
The company says this split will allow both experiences to evolve independently, with Horizon Worlds now repositioned as a mobile-first product.
This is a notable comedown for what was once central to Meta’s strategy. Back in 2021, when Facebook rebranded itself as Meta, CEO Mark Zuckerberg described the metaverse as “the next frontier,” outlining plans to reach a billion users and build a massive digital economy.
Horizon Worlds was meant to be a key part of that vision—a social VR space where users could interact, build, and play through avatars. Reality didn’t quite match the pitch.
Despite the hype, Horizon Worlds never gained meaningful traction. At its peak, the platform reportedly attracted only a few hundred thousand monthly users—a fraction of what Meta had envisioned. The broader challenge was harder to ignore: mainstream users simply didn’t adopt VR at scale.
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