On Thursday, Meta announced a major update to its immersive virtual world Horizon Worlds that will leave the meta versions behind. The tech giant said it is focusing on making Horizon Worlds “almost exclusively mobile” and that it is “explicitly separating” its Quest VR platform from the virtual world.
Meta’s VR and smartglasses division Reality Labs has lost nearly $80 billion since 2020. The Horizon Worlds update and other recent moves signal that Meta is significantly rethinking its VR ambitions.
Last month, the company reportedly laid off roughly 1,500 employees from its Reality Labs division — about 10% of the unit’s workforce — and shuttered several VR game studios. In addition, it was announced that the VR fitness app Supernatural, which Meta acquired in 2023, will no longer produce new content and will go into “maintenance mode”.
Horizon Worlds was originally launched in 2021 as a VR platform and later expanded to web and mobile. Meta said Thursday that to “really change the game and tap into a much bigger market, we’re going all-in on mobile.”
By being mobile first, Horizon Worlds is positioning itself to compete with popular platforms like Roblox and Fortnite.
“Our unique ability to connect these games to billions of people on the world’s largest social networks puts us in a strong position to deliver synchronous social games at scale,” Samantha Ryan, vice president of content at Reality Labs, said in a blog post. “You’ve seen that strategy start to unfold in 2025, and now that’s our main focus.”
Ryan went on to note that Meta is still focused on VR hardware.
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“We have a robust roadmap for future VR headsets that will be tailored to different audience segments as the market grows and matures,” Ryan wrote.
Metaverse ambitions have effectively been abandoned in favor of AI. After shifting its investment in Reality Labs from meta, Meta is now focusing on developing wearable AI devices and refining its own AI models.
During Meta’s most recent earnings call last month, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, “It’s hard to imagine a world in a few years where most of the glasses people wear aren’t AI glasses.”
The exec also said sales of Meta’s glasses have tripled over the past year, calling them “one of the fastest-growing consumer electronics in history.”