Meta Platforms said on March 18, 2026, that Horizon Worlds, the social virtual reality platform at the heart of its metaverse strategy, will stop working on Quest headsets after June 15, 2026. The platform will continue in a mobile version, but the decision effectively ends the first iteration of the vision that led Facebook to rename itself Meta in 2021.
The move was accompanied by further job cuts in Reality Labs, the division responsible for Meta’s VR and AR hardware and software, and by a clear signal from the company that artificial intelligence is now where its discretionary spending will go.
An expensive bet
When Mark Zuckerberg announced the rebrand in October 2021, he described a future in which a billion people would spend time in the metaverse, supporting a digital economy worth hundreds of billions of dollars and creating new kinds of jobs. Reality Labs has since reported operating losses in the tens of billions of dollars, with cumulative losses widely estimated at around 80 billion dollars since 2020.
Horizon Worlds never came close to the audience Meta envisioned. Internal targets reported by The Wall Street Journal in 2022 were cut repeatedly, and the VR version struggled to retain even a few hundred thousand regular users. Meta’s Quest headsets sold in the millions, but most owners used them for games and fitness rather than for Horizon’s social spaces.
Mobile first, AI above all
Meta says Horizon Worlds will live on as a mobile app, where it has been building a presence since 2023, and that creators will be able to carry their content over. The headsets themselves are not being discontinued, and Meta continues to develop smart glasses with EssilorLuxottica, a product line it now describes as its most promising hardware.
The larger shift is financial. Meta has told investors that capital expenditures in 2026 will be dominated by AI infrastructure, including data centers and chips to train and run its Llama models and to power Meta AI across Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. The company has also been hiring aggressively for its superintelligence research group. Against that backdrop, a VR platform that generates little revenue became difficult to justify.
A reported second thought
In the days following the announcement, several outlets reported that Meta had adjusted or partly walked back the plan for the VR version after a backlash from creators. Meta has not issued a detailed public statement clarifying the final arrangement, and users should watch for official guidance before the June date.
Whatever the final shape of Horizon Worlds, the episode marks a rare public retreat for a company that once reorganized itself around a single idea. The metaverse as a concept has not disappeared, but the version Meta sold in 2021, built around headsets and avatars in persistent virtual spaces, has given way to a strategy centered on AI and lightweight wearables.
