Meta pulling the plug on its VR metaverse
Meta Platforms said that users of its Quest headsets will lose access to Horizon Worlds, a virtual destination where cartoon versions of people can meet up and play games, marking the latest pullback from a strategy once central to Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of a so-called metaverse.
Starting 15 June, consumers will no longer be able to build, publish or update virtual reality worlds, or access Meta Horizon Worlds on Meta Quest headsets, the company said on Tuesday.
Access to the virtual worlds will continue on the Meta Horizon mobile app.
A Meta spokesperson referred Bloomberg to a February blog post that said the company was “shifting the focus of Worlds to be almost exclusively mobile” — a signal the change was coming.
The move follows cuts to the team responsible for the headsets and their virtual reality offerings, known as Reality Labs.
In January, Meta began eliminating 1,000 jobs from the division, while also closing down some of its virtual-reality game and content studios.
Chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth, who leads Reality Labs, said in a note to staff at the time that Meta would primarily focus on mobile phone experiences instead of fully immersive virtual worlds accessed via headsets.
Zuckerberg’s push into the metaverse — an effort he had so much conviction around that he renamed Facebook as Meta — has long drawn scrutiny from investors and child safety watchdogs.
Just a few years after that rebrand, and sinking billions of dollars into the effort, the company has shifted its spending to the fast-moving artificial intelligence race.
At Reality Labs, resources have been diverted from VR gaming to wearable products that advance Zuckerberg’s AI ambitions, including the Ray-Ban Meta glasses.
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