Meta announced last Tuesday that Horizon Worlds would no longer be accessible through VR headsets starting on June 15th, after which it would pivot to a mobile-only experience for the virtual world. The news led many to believe that this marked the final nail in the coffin of Mark Zuckerberg's metaverse dreams, which inspired the company's name change five years ago.
Then on Wednesday, after the entire Internet collectively took a dump on Zuckerberg's metaverse vision for the umpteenth time, the company came back with a second statement backpedaling on the decision.
Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth has said during an Instagram AMA:
“We have decided, just today in fact, that we will keep Horizon Worlds working in VR for existing games to support the fans that have reached out like yourself who really care about that. The Horizon Unity runtime games — they're not going to work on mobile. They'll just be working on VR. We're not bringing new games. Again most of our energy is going towards mobile and the meta horizon engine there. The reason for that is that's where most of the consumer and creator energy already was, so we're kind of leaning into that. But for people who already have games they like that they are using in Horizon Worlds, they'll be able to download the horizons app and use it in VR for the foreseeable future.”
Dozens of people worldwide were relieved.
Meta has poured over $90B into its metaverse projects during the past seven years since originally acquiring Oculus, but it never quite took off — unlike competing digital worlds like Roblox and Fortnite, which became household names. Turns out you can't buy cool!
At its peak, Horizon Worlds had fewer than 200,000 monthly active users, recorded in October 2022. A YouTuber who spent a week inside Horizon Worlds in 2023 found it only had around 900 daily active users at the time. And even more dismal than its number of users is the fact that Horizons World has only generated around $1.1M in consumer spending on the platform since its inception. Meanwhile Roblox generated $4.9B in revenue just last year.
Despite keeping Horizon Worlds VR on life support for a little while longer, it's obvious that Meta has effectively scrapped its VR plans to go all in on AI. The New York Times notes that in September, at the same developer conference where in 2021 he announced the renaming of Facebook to Meta, Zuckerberg used the term “metaverse” just twice in the final minutes of his presentation, after mentioning AI 23 times throughout the hour.