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 be capable of construct, publish, or replace VR worlds, or entry Meta Horizon Worlds on Meta Quest headsets, in line with Meta’s announcement.
The platform will survive solely as a standalone cellular app.
It’s a outstanding finish for a venture that prompted Zuckerberg to rename his whole firm.
When Meta modified its identify from Fb in October 2021, Zuckerberg referred to as the metaverse “the subsequent frontier,” writing: “Our hope is that inside the subsequent decade, the metaverse will attain a billion individuals, host a whole lot 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 beneath, in order for you a bit 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 line with Meta’s announcement.
Horizon-specific Meta Horizon Plus perks, together with Meta Credit, Digital Clothes, and In-World Purchases, may also be faraway from the subscription.
Customers who’ve already downloaded Horizon Worlds can maintain enjoying in VR till June 15, after which the app shall be faraway from Quest solely.
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 alternative for Zoom — and deleted all person knowledge. The corporate additionally stopped promoting industrial Quest headsets and stopped accepting new prospects for its Quest for Enterprise program, in line with a enterprise impression evaluation by Snazzy Options.
The January Actuality Labs layoffs reduce over 1,000 workers and shuttered VR studios, together with Ouro Interactive, an in-house studio inbuilt 2023 particularly to create first-party Horizon Worlds content material, in line with Bloomberg.
The invoice comes due
Actuality Labs misplaced $19.19 billion in 2025 alone, bringing cumulative losses since 2020 to $83.6 billion, in line with Meta’s This fall 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 target of Worlds to be virtually solely cellular.”
“By breaking issues down into two distinct platforms, we’ll be higher in a position to clearly concentrate on every,” she added.
Ryan additionally insisted that Meta stays dedicated to VR. She mentioned that Meta was nonetheless “the one greatest investor within the VR business” and nonetheless believed in VR “as a important expertise on the trail to the subsequent computing platform.”
An unattainable promote for enterprise
The failure of Horizon Workrooms, Meta’s enterprise VR assembly platform, was solely predictable.
For those who’re in a Zoom assembly, you possibly can test your e-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 accrued. Bear in mind learn how to use it. Work out learn how to share the assembly invite. Be sure all of your co-workers have their gear. Train a minimum of considered one of them learn how to use theirs.
Then, when you’re truly within the assembly, the screens are laborious to learn. You don’t have quick access to your desktop apps. Typing is tough or unattainable. You may’t test your telephone if one thing pressing is available in.
It’s not sensible for 99.9 % of enterprise use circumstances.
I’ve actually tried to do work in VR. I actually have. I’ve tried to drag my workforce members in. I’ve even given out free headsets. It’s a really laborious promote. There’s actually no upside to doing work in VR. It’s all draw back..
And for the uncommon case the place VR may make sense — say, reviewing a bodily product mockup with a distributed workforce — you’d should add that mockup to Meta’s servers. Meta would have entry to each dialogue about it, each doc associated to it, each inner 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, informed The American Prospect that Horizon Worlds did not get “the social side proper,” noting that “these are digital communities and so they have to be welcoming. They should have individuals you need to hang around with within the expertise.”
What Second Life and OpenSim received proper — form of
In the meantime, Second Life, which launched in 2003, earlier than the iPhone existed, remains to be operating.
So are a whole lot 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 retaining 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 economic 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 style and actual property, in line with an evaluation of the platform’s historical past by sport developer Philip Ludington.
Meta, by comparability, by no means constructed a functioning creator economic 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 cut up made issues worse. When Meta examined in-app purchases, creators obtained solely 52.5 % of pre-tax income after platform charges. Philip Rosedale — now CTO of Linden Lab, and Second Life’s authentic founder — referred to as Meta’s payment construction self-defeating, telling PC Gamer: “It looks as if a good way to dissuade creators from truly taking part in its economic system, however frankly I might anticipate 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 expertise.
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 expertise however reasonably 23 years of accrued tradition, financial infrastructure, and relationships constructed inside a shared world, says Ludington.
OpenSim has one thing even tougher to duplicate: it’s absolutely 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 believe a closed metaverse isn’t the best way to go.
What Meta is shutting down, and what’s staying
A whole lot of headlines this week mentioned “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 line with Meta’s announcement.
Horizon Workrooms: Meta’s VR workplace assembly platform shut down in February, with all person knowledge deleted, in line with PC Gamer.
Quest for Enterprise: Meta stopped promoting industrial Quest headsets and accepting new enterprise prospects in February, in line with PC Gamer.
Meta’s personal first-party VR content material: Meta acknowledged in its developer weblog that 86 % of the time Quest customers spend of their headsets is already with third-party apps — which means its personal content material was largely irrelevant to how individuals truly used the gadget. The corporate has now closed three in-house VR studios solely.
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 line with Engadget.
Nonetheless out there:
Quest headsets: Nonetheless being bought. Meta says it has “a strong roadmap of future VR headsets that shall be tailor-made to completely different viewers segments,” in line with its developer weblog. A next-generation gaming headset is in improvement, in line with Tom’s Information.
Third-party VR video games: Beat Saber, Superhot VR, Gorilla Tag, and 1000’s of others stay absolutely out there on Quest. Meta says it invested practically $150 million in VR developer applications in 2025 and that new releases together with Exhausting Bullet, The Thrill of the Combat 2, and UG every earned hundreds of thousands in income, in line with Meta’s developer weblog.
Horizon Worlds as a cellular app: Survives on iOS and Android, repositioned as a Roblox-style cellular sport platform. Meta says it grew cellular month-to-month lively customers greater than 4 instances over in 2025, and that 4 cellular creators hit $1 million in lifetime income, in line with the developer weblog.
