Meta’s metaverse leaves virtual reality

Meta announced a significant update to its immersive virtual world, Horizon Worlds, on Thursday, marking a major shift away from its earlier metaverse vision. The company said it is refocusing Horizon Worlds to be "almost exclusively mobile" and that it is "explicitly separating" the experience from its Quest VR platform.

Meta's Reality Labs division, which oversees development of VR and smart glasses, has reportedly lost nearly $80 billion since 2020. The Horizon Worlds update, alongside other recent moves, suggests Meta is rethinking the direction and scale of its virtual reality ambitions.

Last month, Meta reportedly laid off around 1,500 employees from Reality Labs — roughly 10% of the division's workforce — and shut down several VR game studios. In addition, reports said the VR fitness app Supernatural, which Meta acquired in 2023, will stop producing new content and transition into "maintenance mode."

Horizon Worlds first launched in 2021 as a VR-focused platform before expanding to the web and mobile. Meta said Thursday that to "truly change the game and tap into a much larger market, we're going all-in on mobile."

By moving to a mobile-first strategy, Horizon Worlds is positioning itself to compete more directly with large-scale social and gaming platforms such as Roblox and Fortnite.

"We're in a strong position to deliver synchronous social games at scale, thanks to our unique ability to connect those games with billions of people on the world's biggest social networks," Samantha Ryan, Reality Labs' VP of content, said in a blog post. "You saw this strategy start to unfold in 2025, and now, it's our main focus."

Ryan added that Meta still plans to continue building VR hardware.

"We have a robust roadmap of future VR headsets that will be tailored to different audience segments as the market grows and matures," Ryan wrote.

The company's focus on AI has increasingly overshadowed Meta's broader metaverse push. After shifting Reality Labs investment away from the metaverse, Meta has increasingly prioritised AI wearables and the development of its own AI models.

During Meta's most recent earnings call last month, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, "It's hard to imagine a world in several years where most glasses that people wear aren't AI glasses". Zuckerberg also said sales of Meta's glasses have tripled over the past year, describing them as "some of the fastest-growing consumer electronics in history."