Meta sent out an email to Horizon Worlds users today saying that the social VR world will officially be ending on its Quest VR headsets; As of March 31, Horizon Worlds will no longer be in the Quest Store. Some Horizon-specific perks will also be removed, including meta credits, avatars, and some digital clothing and worldwide purchases. VR World will be completely shut down on June 15, after which the service will be available only as a mobile platform.
The move comes after Meta made sweeping cuts to its Reality Labs division in February, laying off 10 percent of the staff in its VR department.
Horizon Worlds was Meta’s grand effort at building the Metaverse, an aspiration of a completely virtual environment inspired by Neal Stephenson. snow accident. The company was so confident in the effort that it changed its name from Facebook to Meta in support of its VR efforts.
Horizon Worlds is one of the less popular VR services out there, so if you can find the borderline glee in the comments of the r/Oculus subreddit thread about the service termination it may be anything but. It has been widely ridiculed since it was first announced, particularly due to its poor start. Player avatars had no legs and looked like such dead-eyed monsters that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s supernatural avatar became a meme.
Almost immediately, Horizon Worlds became populated primarily by children. But screaming kids throwing digital donuts around aren’t the most stable or profitable user base. Meta poured billions of dollars into the service, arranging high-profile partnerships with other brands and artists to host virtual concerts by Imagine Dragons and Coldplay. Even with all this fanfare, Meta’s proprietary-verse has always been less popular than VRChat, the social service that people actually love enough to participate in virtual raves and presidential elections.
As Meta has shifted its focus to artificial intelligence and its Ray-Ban smart glasses, it has drastically cut back on its investments in its Metaverse divisions, including pausing updates to very popular services like Supernatural Fitness.
“Meta’s pivot to Horizon Worlds is the predictable and inevitable result of a big, risky bet that never found an audience,” Mike Proulx, vice president and research director at market research firm Forrester, wrote in an email to WIRED. “Meta was trying to solve a consumer problem that doesn’t exist. You can’t build a massive social platform relying on hardware most people neither own nor want to wear for short periods of time.”
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