Meta announced this week that it is pulling the plug on the virtual reality version of Horizon Worlds, the platform that was once the centerpiece of Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse bet.
Starting June 15, users will no longer be able to build, publish, or update VR worlds, or access Meta Horizon Worlds on Meta Quest headsets, according to Meta’s announcement.
The platform will survive only as a standalone mobile app.
It’s a remarkable end for a project that prompted Zuckerberg to rename his entire company.
When Meta changed its name from Facebook in October 2021, Zuckerberg called the metaverse “the next frontier,” writing: “Our hope is that within the next decade, the metaverse will reach a billion people, host hundreds of billions of dollars of digital commerce, and support jobs for millions of creators and developers.”
Well, that didn’t go the way he planned. In his video back then announcing the metaverse, which I forced myself to watch, Zuckerberg came off a bit lizard-like,
You can watch his entire keynote presentation below, if you want a little blast from the past:
What’s going away, and when
By March 31, Horizon Worlds and Events will disappear from the Quest Store, and Meta’s own showcase worlds — Horizon Central, Events Arena, Kaiju, and Bobber Bay — will go dark in VR, according to Meta’s announcement.
Horizon-specific Meta Horizon Plus perks, including Meta Credits, Digital Clothing, and In-World Purchases, will also be removed from the subscription.
Users who have already downloaded Horizon Worlds can keep playing in VR until June 15, after which the app will be removed from Quest entirely.
This week’s announcement wasn’t the first shoe to drop.
In February, Meta permanently shut down Horizon Workrooms — the VR meeting platform pitched to office workers as a replacement for Zoom — and deleted all user data. The company also stopped selling commercial Quest headsets and stopped accepting new customers for its Quest for Business program, according to a business impact analysis by Snazzy Solutions.
The January Reality Labs layoffs cut over 1,000 employees and shuttered VR studios, including Ouro Interactive, an in-house studio built in 2023 specifically to create first-party Horizon Worlds content, according to Bloomberg.
The bill comes due
Reality Labs lost $19.19 billion in 2025 alone, bringing cumulative losses since 2020 to $83.6 billion, according to Meta’s Q4 and full-year 2025 earnings report.
Samantha Ryan, Meta’s VP of content at Reality Labs, framed the shutdown as a “doubling down” rather than a retreat, saying in a February blog post that Meta would be “doubling down on the VR developer ecosystem while shifting the focus of Worlds to be almost exclusively mobile.”
“By breaking things down into two distinct platforms, we’ll be better able to clearly focus on each,” she added.
Ryan also insisted that Meta remains committed to VR. She said that Meta was still “the single biggest investor in the VR industry” and still believed in VR “as a critical technology on the path to the next computing platform.”
An impossible sell for business
The failure of Horizon Workrooms, Meta’s enterprise VR meeting platform, was entirely predictable.
If you’re in a Zoom meeting, you can check your email, pull up your calendar, share your screen, use a whiteboard, and access recordings and transcripts. Everyone already has Zoom installed. Everyone already has a camera.
If you want to hold that same meeting in VR, you first need to find your headset. Charge it. Download whatever updates have accumulated. Remember how to use it. Figure out how to share the meeting invite. Make sure all your co-workers have their equipment. Teach at least one of them how to use theirs.
Then, once you’re actually in the meeting, the screens are hard to read. You don’t have easy access to your desktop apps. Typing is difficult or impossible. You can’t check your phone if something urgent comes in.
It’s not practical for 99.9 percent of business use cases.
I’ve really tried to do work in VR. I really have. I’ve tried to pull my team members in. I’ve even given out free headsets. It’s a very hard sell. There’s really no upside to doing work in VR. It’s all downside..
And for the rare case where VR might make sense — say, reviewing a physical product mockup with a distributed team — you’d have to upload that mockup to Meta’s servers. Meta would have access to every discussion about it, every document related to it, every internal detail of your product development process. For any company serious about intellectual property, that alone is a dealbreaker.
This is what Horizon Workrooms never solved. The consumer version had the same problems. Wagner James Au, a longtime virtual worlds journalist, told The American Prospect that Horizon Worlds failed to get “the social aspect right,” noting that “these are virtual communities and they need to be welcoming. They need to have people you want to hang out with in the experience.”
What Second Life and OpenSim got right — kind of
Meanwhile, Second Life, which launched in 2003, before the iPhone existed, is still running.
So are hundreds of OpenSim grids, many of them operated by volunteers on a shoestring budget. The hypergrid, a network of interconnected OpenSim worlds where avatars can teleport between grids while keeping their appearance, belongings, and friend lists, was never going to lose $19 billion in a single year. It also was never going to get shut down by a quarterly earnings call.
The contrast with Meta is stark. Second Life’s virtual economy moves roughly $650 million per year, and Linden Lab has paid out $1.1 billion to creators over the platform’s lifetime — 14 of whom became millionaires from selling virtual fashion and real estate, according to an analysis of the platform’s history by game developer Philip Ludington.
Meta, by comparison, never built a functioning creator economy. While Second Life users retain copyright to their content, Meta Horizon Worlds gave Meta sole control over content and usage rights. It was a closed ecosystem run by a single entity.
The revenue split made things worse. When Meta tested in-app purchases, creators received only 52.5 percent of pre-tax revenue after platform fees. Philip Rosedale — now CTO of Linden Lab, and Second Life’s original founder — called Meta’s fee structure self-defeating, telling PC Gamer: “It seems like a great way to dissuade creators from actually participating in its economy, but frankly I would expect nothing less from them.” He noted at the time that Linden Lab had paid out $86 million to Second Life creators in a single year.
Second Life’s magic sauce was not its technology.
Meta thought better graphics and VR immersion would help it succeed. Sansar thought VR-native design would do it. High Fidelity thought next-gen infrastructure would do it. Decentraland thought blockchain ownership would do it. None of it worked, because Second Life’s advantage isn’t technology but rather 23 years of accumulated culture, economic infrastructure, and relationships built inside a shared world, says Ludington.
OpenSim has something even harder to replicate: it’s fully open source, decentralized, and owned by no one. No corporate board can decide to shut it down. No quarterly earnings report can kill it. It’s more like the way the Internet works, and why I’m a big fan. And also why I’ve been writing about OpenSim for the past 17 years.
Personally, I think a closed metaverse isn’t the way to go.
What Meta is shutting down, and what’s staying
A lot of headlines this week said “Meta kills its metaverse.” Including mine. That’s how you get the clicks, right?
But that’s not quite the full picture.
Shutting down in VR:
- Horizon Worlds — but just the VR version: Gone from the Quest Store by March 31; the app itself removed from all Quest headsets on June 15, according to Meta’s announcement.
- Horizon Workrooms: Meta’s VR office meeting platform shut down in February, with all user data deleted, according to PC Gamer.
- Quest for Business: Meta stopped selling commercial Quest headsets and accepting new enterprise customers in February, according to PC Gamer.
- Meta’s own first-party VR content: Meta acknowledged in its developer blog that 86 percent of the time Quest users spend in their headsets is already with third-party apps — meaning its own content was largely irrelevant to how people actually used the device. The company has now closed three in-house VR studios entirely.
- The Horizon Feed and Worlds button in Quest’s interface: The headset’s new Navigator UI boots to a grid of installed apps, with the Horizon social feed removed, according to Engadget.
Still available:
- Quest headsets: Still being sold. Meta says it has “a robust roadmap of future VR headsets that will be tailored to different audience segments,” according to its developer blog. A next-generation gaming headset is in development, according to Tom’s Guide.
- Third-party VR games: Beat Saber, Superhot VR, Gorilla Tag, and thousands of others remain fully available on Quest. Meta says it invested nearly $150 million in VR developer programs in 2025 and that new releases including Hard Bullet, The Thrill of the Fight 2, and UG each earned millions in revenue, according to Meta’s developer blog.
- Horizon Worlds as a mobile app: Survives on iOS and Android, repositioned as a Roblox-style mobile game platform. Meta says it grew mobile monthly active users more than four times over in 2025, and that four mobile creators hit $1 million in lifetime revenue, according to the developer blog.
