For years, the metaverse was supposed to be the future. Now, it looks like it’s becoming the past.
Meta has announced a major update to its immersive virtual platform, Horizon Worlds, effectively repositioning it away from its original metaverse ambitions. Instead of doubling down on virtual reality, the company is going “almost exclusively mobile,” explicitly separating Horizon Worlds from its Quest VR ecosystem.
In short: the metaverse is no longer the center of gravity.
And for a company who renamed itself “Meta” that says a lot.
From VR Flagship to Mobile Platform
Horizon Worlds launched in 2021 as a VR-native social world, closely tied to Meta Quest headsets. It later expanded to web and mobile, but VR remained its core identity. Now, Meta says it’s going all-in on mobile to “truly change the game and tap into a much larger market.”
The shift positions Horizon Worlds less as a hardware-driven virtual reality playground and more as a social gaming platform competing directly with Roblox and Fortnite, both of which already dominate the cross-platform, social-gaming space.
According to Samantha Ryan, VP of Content at Reality Labs, Meta believes it’s uniquely positioned to scale synchronous social games thanks to its ability to plug them into its massive social network infrastructure.
That’s a very different narrative from the one we heard in 2021.
Reality Labs: $80 Billion Later
The strategic pivot follows mounting pressure inside Meta’s Reality Labs division, the unit responsible for VR and smart glasses development.
Since 2020, Reality Labs has reportedly lost nearly $80 billion. Last month, Meta laid off around 1,500 employees from the division, roughly 10% of its workforce, and shut down multiple VR game studios.
Even Supernatural, the VR fitness app Meta acquired in 2023, is reportedly moving into “maintenance mode,” with no new content planned.
These moves don’t suggest a company scaling its metaverse dream. They suggest a company recalibrating hard.
VR Isn’t Dead But It’s No Longer the Story
Meta insists it’s still committed to VR hardware. Ryan noted the company has a “robust roadmap” of future headsets tailored to different audience segments. But strategically, the cultural narrative has shifted.
During Meta’s latest earnings call, CEO Mark Zuckerberg made something clear: the future isn’t immersive worlds. It’s AI.
“It’s hard to imagine a world in several years where most glasses that people wear aren’t AI glasses,” he said.
Sales of Meta’s glasses reportedly tripled over the past year, which Zuckerberg described as some of the fastest-growing consumer electronics in history. That statement alone says everything about where Meta’s ambition now lives.
From Metaverse to AI Wearables
The bigger story isn’t Horizon Worlds going mobile. It’s what that move represents.
Meta’s grand metaverse rebrand once defined the company’s strategic direction. Today, AI, from large language models to AI-powered wearables, is clearly the new frontier. The pivot signals a broader industry reality: immersive VR worlds haven’t reached mainstream scale. Mobile platforms have. AI glasses might.
Instead of forcing users into headsets, Meta is now betting on meeting them where they already are: on their phones, and eventually, on their faces.