Meta ends metaverse push: Why Horizon Worlds was shut down

​Almost five years ago, Mark Zuckerberg called the metaverse «the next version of the internet.» For the sake of this idea, Facebook rebranded as Meta, and Horizon Worlds was supposed to become its central platform. But in 2026, the project was effectively shut down. Why did one of the world’s largest tech companies make such a major miscalculation?

End of the VR metaverse

In March 2026, Meta officially confirmed what the market had expected for several years: the company is winding down the VR version of Horizon Worlds. The app will be removed from the Quest store at the end of March and will completely cease to function on VR devices by June. Only the mobile version of the product will remain available to users.

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This decision became part of a broader strategy—to separate the metaverse from the VR direction and focus on formats with a wider audience. In effect, Meta acknowledged that its bet on VR as the main entry point into the metaverse did not pay off, and further growth is only possible beyond headsets. To understand why Meta ultimately made this move, it is important to go back five years—to the moment when Horizon Worlds was conceived not as an experiment but as a central element of the future internet.

When strategy outpaces market

The launch of Horizon Worlds in December 2021 was not just the release of a new social platform. It was a demonstration of Meta’s strategic pivot. The company was betting on the so-called embodied internet—an internet where the user does not look at a screen but «exists inside» a digital space. Around this idea, an entire ecosystem was built: Quest VR headsets, tools for creating user-generated worlds, and an internal economy. Horizon Worlds was meant to become for Web 2.0 what Facebook once was—a foundational social infrastructure.

The scale of investment matched the ambition. Reality Labs, the division responsible for the metaverse, has generated more than $70 billion in losses since 2021, according to Bloomberg. In 2023 alone, its operating loss reached about $16 billion. For comparison, that exceeds the annual profit of many major technology companies. The problem was that Meta was investing not in improving an existing product but in a hypothetical market that had yet to form.

Product no one was waiting for

The main mistake of Horizon Worlds was simple—the product did not meet a real market need. Despite billions in investment, the platform never became mainstream. In October 2022, The Wall Street Journal, citing internal Meta documents, reported that Horizon Worlds had fewer than 200,000 monthly active users.

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The barrier to entry into the «new internet» turned out to be critically high. To access the metaverse, users needed a VR headset costing hundreds of dollars, as well as the willingness to put it on and spend time inside. This is fundamentally different from привычное поведение в интернете, where entry is just a single click.

Even for those who made it in, the experience often fell short. Horizon Worlds’ graphics became a frequent target of ridicule—especially after Mark Zuckerberg posted a screenshot of his avatar that looked like a character from early-2000s games. Limited use cases, «empty» worlds, and weak social dynamics reinforced the sense that this was not a new reality but a rough experiment.

Timing also mattered. While Meta was investing heavily in VR, the market sharply shifted toward artificial intelligence. User interest moved to tools that deliver immediate value—from content generation to workflow automation. Against this backdrop, the idea of «living in the metaverse» felt more imposed than organic. The contrast is especially clear in platforms like Roblox and VRChat, which grew organically by building on user behavior. Meta, by contrast, tried to build the infrastructure first and then bring users into it. That approach did not work.

How market voted with money

Investors began to question Meta’s strategy almost immediately after it was announced. According to Financial Express, in 2022 the company’s stock fell by more than 60% from its peak, largely due to rising spending on the metaverse and the lack of a clear monetization model. The market’s signal was clear: investments in Reality Labs looked like capital burn without a visible path to returns.

The turning point came in 2023, when Meta declared a «year of efficiency» and began aggressively cutting costs. The company laid off more than 20,000 employees, reduced expenses, and shifted its focus back to advertising and AI. If Meta’s stock was trading around $90 at the end of 2022, by the end of 2023 it had surpassed $350, and in 2024 it reached new highs, exceeding the roughly $380 level last seen in 2021.

Notably, the subsequent rise in the stock price did not coincide successfully in the metaverse but with a gradual deprioritization of it. Cuts to Reality Labs spending and the pivot toward AI were received positively by the market. In effect, investors had «voted» against the metaverse long before it became очевидно на уровне продукта.

What didn’t work and what comes next

The story of Horizon Worlds is not proof that virtual worlds are unnecessary. On the contrary, they already exist and are developing successfully. Roblox, Fortnite, and other platforms show that users are willing to spend time in digital environments when those environments are integrated into their everyday experience.

What failed was the idea of a centralized metaverse. Meta tried to accelerate the arrival of the future while ignoring the key variable—user readiness. At the same time, the bet on VR as the primary interface turned out to be premature. The technology remains niche: devices are bulky, use cases are limited, and the value proposition is unclear for mass adoption.

Meanwhile, the next technological cycle has already begun to take shape around AI and augmented reality. If a new «metaverse» does emerge, it will likely appear not as a standalone product but as a layer on top of reality—through glasses, voice interfaces, and intelligent systems. The main conclusion is straightforward: Meta was not wrong in believing that virtual worlds have a future. It was wrong about when that future would arrive—and how users would get there.