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, based on Meta’s announcement.
The platform will survive solely as a standalone cell app.
It’s a exceptional finish for a venture 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 subsequent frontier,” writing: “Our hope is that throughout 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.”
Nicely, that didn’t go the best way he deliberate. In his video again then asserting the metaverse, which I pressured myself to look at, Zuckerberg got here off a bit lizard-like,
You may watch his whole keynote presentation under, if you would like 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, based on 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 preserve enjoying in VR till June 15, after which the app will probably 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 employees as a substitute for Zoom — and deleted all person information. The corporate additionally stopped promoting industrial Quest headsets and stopped accepting new prospects for its Quest for Enterprise program, based on a enterprise affect evaluation by Snazzy Options.
The January Actuality Labs layoffs lower over 1,000 workers and shuttered VR studios, together with Ouro Interactive, an in-house studio in-built 2023 particularly to create first-party Horizon Worlds content material, based on Bloomberg.
The invoice comes due
Actuality Labs misplaced $19.19 billion in 2025 alone, bringing cumulative losses since 2020 to $83.6 billion, based on 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” fairly than a retreat, saying in a February weblog put up that Meta can be “doubling down on the VR developer ecosystem whereas shifting the main focus of Worlds to be nearly completely cell.”
“By breaking issues down into two distinct platforms, we’ll be higher in a position to clearly give attention to 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 essential know-how on the trail to the subsequent computing platform.”
An inconceivable promote for enterprise
The failure of Horizon Workrooms, Meta’s enterprise VR assembly platform, was solely predictable.
In the event you’re in a Zoom assembly, you’ll be able to test your e mail, pull up your calendar, share your display screen, use a whiteboard, and entry recordings and transcripts. Everybody already has Zoom put in. Everybody already has a digital camera.
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 the best way to use it. Work out the best way to share the assembly invite. Ensure that all of your co-workers have their tools. Educate no less than one in all them the best way to use theirs.
Then, when you’re truly within the assembly, the screens are onerous to learn. You don’t have quick access to your desktop apps. Typing is tough or inconceivable. You may’t test your telephone if one thing pressing is available in.
It’s not sensible for 99.9 % of enterprise use instances.
I’ve actually tried to do work in VR. I actually have. I’ve tried to drag my staff members in. I’ve even given out free headsets. It’s a really onerous 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 staff — 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 inner element of your product improvement course of. For any firm critical 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, advised The American Prospect that Horizon Worlds did not get “the social side proper,” noting that “these are digital communities they usually must be welcoming. They should have individuals you wish to hang around with within the expertise.”
What Second Life and OpenSim bought 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, lots of them operated by volunteers on a shoestring price range. The hypergrid, a community of interconnected OpenSim worlds the place avatars can teleport between grids whereas maintaining their look, belongings, and pal lists, was by no means going to lose $19 billion in a single 12 months. 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 12 months, and Linden Lab has paid out $1.1 billion to creators over the platform’s lifetime — 14 of whom turned millionaires from promoting digital trend and actual property, based on an evaluation of the platform’s historical past by sport 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 % 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 payment construction self-defeating, telling PC Gamer: “It looks like a good way to dissuade creators from truly collaborating in its financial system, however frankly I’d 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 12 months.
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 fairly 23 years of accrued tradition, financial infrastructure, and relationships constructed inside a shared world, says Ludington.
OpenSim has one thing even tougher to copy: 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
A whole 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 total 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, based on Meta’s announcement.
Horizon Workrooms: Meta’s VR workplace assembly platform shut down in February, with all person information deleted, based on PC Gamer.
Quest for Enterprise: Meta stopped promoting industrial Quest headsets and accepting new enterprise prospects in February, based on 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, based on Engadget.
Nonetheless obtainable:
Quest headsets: Nonetheless being bought. Meta says it has “a sturdy roadmap of future VR headsets that will probably be tailor-made to completely different viewers segments,” based on its developer weblog. A next-generation gaming headset is in improvement, based on Tom’s Information.
Third-party VR video games: Beat Saber, Superhot VR, Gorilla Tag, and hundreds of others stay totally obtainable on Quest. Meta says it invested practically $150 million in VR developer packages 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, based on Meta’s developer weblog.
Horizon Worlds as a cell app: Survives on iOS and Android, repositioned as a Roblox-style cell sport platform. Meta says it grew cell month-to-month lively customers greater than 4 occasions over in 2025, and that 4 cell creators hit $1 million in lifetime income, based on the developer weblog.
