The Meta Horizon Worlds logo is seen on a smartphone screen with the Meta logo in the background in Chania, Greece on August 9, 2024.
Nikolas Kokovlis | Nuphoto | Getty Images
Meta announced its closure on Tuesday Horizon WorldsTHE virtual reality social network for Quest VR headsets which was once a key part of the pivot to the metaverse.
In a community blog, Meta announced that the Horizon Worlds app would be removed from the Quest store at the end of March and removed from VR entirely on June 15. After this date, it will only be available on a standalone mobile application.
“We are separating the two platforms so that each can develop in a more focused way, and the Horizon Worlds platform will become a mobile-only experience,” the company said in announcing the change.
The move to Horizon Worlds, which was once a central part of the company’s transition to virtual reality, comes weeks after Meta laid off more than 1,000 employees. Reality Labsthe unit responsible for the metaverse.
The January cuts at Reality Labs also affected studios that were working on VR titles, including Ouro Interactive, an in-house studio that debuted in 2023 to create proprietary content for Horizon Worlds.
When Meta changed its name from Facebook in October 2021 to cement the pivot to the metaverse, CEO Mark Zuckerberg called it “the next frontier.”
“We hope that over the next decade the metaverse will reach a billion people, host hundreds of billions of dollars of digital commerce, and support the employment of millions of creators and developers,” Zuckerberg wrote at the time announcing the change.
Read more CNBC tech newsHorizon Worlds I had trouble finding users like the general public remained skeptical of virtual reality.
The social platform has never attracted more than a few hundred thousand monthly active users, CNBC previously reported.
The 3D virtual social network where avatars could interact and play games with other users was officially launched in late 2021. It ran exclusively on the Quest VR platform until Meta launched a mobile app version in September 2023.
The mobile version of Horizon Worlds was designed to provide an entry point for users without a VR headset, functioning similarly to Roblox.
The Metaverse has proven to be an expensive gamble. Reality Labs unit released billions of losses every quarter after its launch. In fourth-quarter results released in January, the unit recorded a operating loss of $6.02 billion.
Meta has since evolved towards advancement artificial intelligencethereby reducing its once-heavy focus on virtual reality.
Meta announced it would restructure its virtual reality efforts last month.
In February blog post Announcing the change, Reality Labs VP of Content Samantha Ryan said Meta would “double down on the VR developer ecosystem while reorienting the focus of worlds to be almost exclusively mobile.”
“By splitting things up into two separate platforms, we’ll be better able to clearly focus on each,” Ryan said.