According to an Instagram post from Meta’s CTO Andrew Bosworth, Meta is not shutting down VR support for Horizon Worlds after all, which should come as a huge relief to, like, five people.
“We have decided, just today in fact, that we will keep Horizon Worlds working in VR,” Bosworth said as part of an Instagram Stories Q&A after a fan of the app reached out to say they were “heartbroken” about the decision.
A Meta spokesperson confirmed Bosworth’s comments to TechCrunch.
Meta indicated earlier this year that it would stop supporting the social metaverse app on its Quest virtual reality headsets, which was a big concession for an app that Meta once envisioned as central to socializing in VR. As it turned out, very few people actually wanted to hang out in VR. On Tuesday, Meta confirmed on its community forums that Horizon Worlds would move to web and mobile only on June 15, but that announcement was quickly reversed.
Even if Horizon Worlds will now remain accessible via Quest, the fact that Meta planned to shut it down is proof enough that the metaverse — or at least how it was imagined in VR — turned out to be a black hole where Reality Labs funding went to die. That division at Meta has lost $73 billion since 2021, the year that Meta rebranded from Facebook. As we pointed out previously, you’d have to spend $1 million per day for 200 years to spend that much money. (Reality Labs also accounts for spending on augmented reality products like smart glasses, as well as some AI research.)
According to the IDC, a tech market intelligence firm, Meta’s Quest headset sales were down 16% year-over-year from 2024 to 2025, making it seem unlikely that this hardware will ever meaningfully compete with the smartphone. It’s not just Meta that has struggled to make virtual reality compelling — Apple had to scale back production of its $3,500 Vision Pro headset due to low demand.
Meta has responded to this decline by making significant cuts in its Reality Labs division in January, impacting over 1,500 employees and shuttering several game studios. Rumor has it that Meta …