Pour one out from your digital bottle, because Meta is shutting down the virtual reality experience of Horizon Worlds.
Meta sent an email blast to Horizon Worlds users today stating that the social VR world will officially end on its Quest VR headsets; starting March 31, Horizon Worlds will no longer be in the Quest store. Some Horizon-specific perks, including Meta Credits, avatars, and some digital clothes and in-world purchases, will also be removed. The VR worlds will be shutting down entirely on June 15, after which the service will be available only as a mobile platform.
The move comes after Meta made widespread cuts to its Reality Labs division in February, laying off 10 percent of employees in its VR department.
Horizon Worlds was Meta’s grand foray into building out the metaverse, the aspiration of a fully virtual environment inspired by Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. The company believed in the effort so much that it changed its name from Facebook to Meta in support of its VR endeavors.
Horizon Worlds is one of the less popular VR services out there, if the borderline glee you can find in the comments of the r/oculus subreddit thread about the service ending is anything to go by. It was widely mocked since it was first announced, especially due to a rocky start. Player avatars didn’t have legs and looked like such dead-eyed monsters that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s uncanny avatar became a meme.
Almost immediately, Horizon Worlds was populated primarily by children. But screeching kiddos throwing digital doughnuts around are not the most stable or profitable user base. Meta pumped billions of dollars into the service, arranging high-profile partnerships with other brands and artists to have virtual concerts by Imagine Dragons and Coldplay. Even with all that pomp, Meta’s proprietary-verse has always been less popular than VRChat, the social service that people actually seem to like enough to attend virtual raves and presidential elections.
As Meta shifts its focus to artificial intelligence and its Ray-Ban smart glasses, it has drastically cut its investments in its metaverse divisions, including stopping updates to very popular services like Supernatural Fitness.
“Meta’s pivot on Horizon Worlds is the predicted and inevitable outcome of a big, risky bet that never found an audience,” wrote Mike Proulx, vice president and research director at market research firm Forrester, in an email to WIRED. “Meta was trying to solve for a consumer problem that doesn’t exist. You can’t build a mass social platform reliant on hardware most people neither own nor want to wear for more than short bursts.”
