The virtual world that barely anyone visited is now officially closing. Meta has announced the end of Horizon Worlds on VR platforms — gone from the Quest store by March, terminated on all VR devices by June 15. After nearly $80 billion in losses and years of disappointing adoption, Mark Zuckerberg is finally moving on from the metaverse he once said would define the future.
The promise of the metaverse was enormous. When Zuckerberg rebranded Facebook as Meta in late 2021, he laid out a vision of shared virtual spaces that would become as essential to daily life as smartphones. He described billions of users living, working, and playing inside a persistent digital world — a world that Meta would build and operate at the very center of the new internet.
The lived reality of Horizon Worlds was far less grand. The platform hosted a few hundred thousand monthly users at its peak — numbers that made the metaverse feel less like the next internet and more like a niche VR gaming community. Updates and feature additions did little to change the fundamental problem: most people simply had no compelling reason to put on a headset and enter a cartoon virtual world.
Reality Labs absorbed the losses. The division posted close to $80 billion in cumulative deficits since 2020, representing a sustained financial commitment that ultimately yielded no clear path to profitability. Layoffs of more than 1,000 Reality Labs employees in early 2025 preceded Meta’s formal strategic shift toward artificial intelligence and wearable technology.
The metaverse’s closure provoked sharp commentary online. Users described the experiment as a monument to misplaced resources and corporate ego. Others acknowledged that some technological failures are necessary precursors to eventual success, and that the lessons from the metaverse may yet shape AI and hardware development more productively. Either way, the era is over.
