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Meta Is Shutting Down VR Social Platform Horizon Worlds (cnbc.com) 51

Posted by BeauHD from the change-of-plans dept.
Meta is shutting down its VR social platform Horizon Worlds, which was once a key piece of the pivot to the metaverse. The company said the app will be taken off the Quest store at the end of March, and fully removed from Quest headsets by June 15. After that date, it will shift to a standalone "mobile-only experience." CNBC reports: The shift for Horizon Worlds, which was once a central part of the company's push into virtual reality, comes weeks after Meta cut over 1,000 employees from Reality Labs, the unit responsible for the metaverse. [...] The social platform has never drawn more than a couple hundred thousand active users a month, CNBC previously reported.

The virtual 3D social network where avatars could interact and play games with other users officially launched in late 2021. It operated exclusively on the Quest VR platform until Meta launched a mobile app version in September 2023. The mobile version of Horizon Worlds was built to provide an entry point for users without VR headsets, functioning similarly to Roblox.
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Meta Is Shutting Down VR Social Platform Horizon Worlds

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  • Nobody saw that coming ! (Score:5, Funny)

    by greytree ( 7124971 ) on Wednesday March 18, 2026 @03:10PM (#66048288)
    Well, nobody wearing VR glasses.

    The rest of us though...

    • Nice. Palmer cashed that check faaaaaaast.

    • Deserves the Funny, but I'm hoping for a joke storm on the topic. My own attempt at humor will fall down, of course. It's like the tree that fell down in the forest and no one heard it. Did it make a sound?

      And I never heard of this thing, whatever it was. I just hope Zuck lost a lot of money down the toilet. More noise getting flushed than it ever made before it was shut down?

      Related reading? Recommending a book on Slashdot is another joke these years, but Feeding the Machine: The Hidden Human Labour Power

    • my wife just got us both quest 3s's for valentines so we could go to a virtual mini concert together on vrchat; we also have been exploring various user made worlds there; including places ported from games from my childhood like phantasy star online (theres even a vr playable implimentation of the basic gameplay); its been amazing fun and really a special experience to be in those spaces physically with my heavenly wife; i wish we had met back then; but she was a toddler in russia at the time

      • my wife just got us both quest 3s's for valentines so we could go to a virtual mini concert together on vrchat; we also have been exploring various user made worlds there; including places ported from games from my childhood like phantasy star online (theres even a vr playable implimentation of the basic gameplay); its been amazing fun and really a special experience to be in those spaces physically with my heavenly wife; i wish we had met back then; but she was a toddler in russia at the time

        ....I really

  • What's in a name (Score:3)

    by Himmy32 ( 650060 ) on Wednesday March 18, 2026 @03:14PM (#66048294)
    As their metaverse vision completes it's final death throes, keeping the brand name marking their misguided chase of a fad seems still appropriate.

  • What a despicable blight on the VR world that piece of shit was. I'm glad it moved to mobile where it belongs.

  • ...except for the people who lost their job without lining up something else first.
  • Next step, shut down Meta.

  • Time to dust off my old Quest headset. Maybe there will be a party, Restaurant at the End of the Universe-style.

  • ... is now just Averse? A nonsensical verse at that!

    That's okay - if it had succeeded, it would have taken on an additional letter and become 'Metadverse'.

  • So? (Score:3)

    by Locke2005 ( 849178 ) on Wednesday March 18, 2026 @04:09PM (#66048408)
    "And nothing of value was lost..." -- The Critic
  • vrchat is what people actually want to go to

  • Not just careless but awful people (Score:3)

    by Yo,dog! ( 1819436 ) on Wednesday March 18, 2026 @04:28PM (#66048440)
    How creeps like Zuckerberg thought they could sell nothingness for big money.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      A journalist in the UK looked into Meta's VR thing a few years ago, and found that if they logged in as a 16 year old girl, they were immediately and relentlessly harassed by older men. Meta seems to have been aware of it, and provided users with a "shield" that prevents anyone else getting to close to their avatar, and the 16 year old girl was bombarded with demands to turn it off. Despite avatars having no crotch, it didn't stop the creeps trying to grind up against her.

      Musk may have build a child porn fa

  • ...when they renamed the company to follow that weird bent. It was very easy very early on to see that none of this would ever be popular, people had a hard enough time getting interested in even wearing polarized glasses to view movies in 3D, that whole trend has crashed and burned. (I like stereo photography myself, but I understand the problem with mass appeal) But the fact that they expected people to run out and buy these super expensive VR headsets and do things with them is just laughable. I've

    • I've seen one good use for a VR headset so far: peripheral vision testing at an optometrist.

      Everything else is a waste of time and resources.

    • Oh it's worse than you think. I had the mis(fortune) to talk to META VR and AR engineers at one point. I was stunned, as they are asking semi-technical questions, to learn they had little to no experience with VR or AR itself. They didn't even use or care about their own products! Further, they had this aura of "I'm too superior ro use VR and AR that's for nerds". It blew me away. The entire group was run by marketing/politics masquerading as basic engineering. Mark was too nice to them, and let them take h

      • Mark was too nice to them, and let them take him for a ride.

        I'm pretty sure it was all his idea, including the smug marketing-driven leadership. Sounds like he had exactly the team he wanted working on this thing.

  • Nelson reaction...

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

  • You can't shut it down!!! It's supposed to be the leading generator of revenue and everyone will be using VR glasses like cell phones! Wait, that was something like 2010.

  • MarkZ finally learns that hiring attractive, supposed "smart" people, who play politics all day can't develop. You'd think someone was a programmer would clue in faster.

  • I still remember (Score:3)

    by RitchCraft ( 6454710 ) on Wednesday March 18, 2026 @06:39PM (#66048744)

    I still remember watching Zuck on stage, with his big soulless eyes, telling everyone that this was the future, and being completely amazed this idiot is actually a billionaire. How many billions did this fool waste on this venture? Why is he still a billionaire? What is wrong with the fucking world?

  • The staggering stupidity of it (Score:3)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Wednesday March 18, 2026 @06:40PM (#66048748)
    Really does show that if you take a billionaire outside of the one thing they blundered into that they really are completely incompetent.

    Just like how we found out how completely incompetent Elon Musk was when he got to design a vehicle and the result was the cybertruck

    Like the old saying goes never ask a Man how he made his first million.

  • Oh no! Why God, why?

  • It's not really clear to me. This was the thing they broadly referred to as "the Metaverse" . . . right?

    Like the demo of avatars finally having legs, that's the thing being shut down and nothing is really replacing it except a mobile app that makes it not even really be that thing anymore or am I misunderstanding?

    I caught in the article that they say they are "doubling down" and such, but I don't think it really said what "the Metaverse" is anymore . . . it's nothing right?

    It'd be hilarious but it's basical

  • The Quest's original purpose was simply a gaming console. The only thing different from an XBox or PlayStation or Steam deck or whatever is that it played VR games instead. Why Meta would buy it and think that people would want to put on a headset where you couldn't actually see each other and then just chat with avatars is crazy. There are probably hundreds of regular 2D apps that allow socializing where you can actually see each other on the camera.

  • Just couldn't get the legs working (Score:3)

    by BoogieChile ( 517082 ) on Wednesday March 18, 2026 @10:07PM (#66049022)
    It just couldn't stand up to the competition

  • I don't know if this would count as VR, but I've always thought that some kind of glasses with a built-in monitor would be useful. You see that sort of thing sometimes in stuff like Ironman.

    You could see through the glasses as usual but you could have a monitor in the corner (or where-ever else you wanted to place it) at any relative size you want (since you could decide if you wanted it to appear big and far away or close up and small).

  • Zuck, could you please repay Meta for all the money you pissed off on this "adventure". And no sneaky getting your Arab friends to chip in, it should come from your personal finances so we can be sure you feel genuine remorse.

  • Meta (Score:2)

    by ledow ( 319597 )

    Yesterday I was doing something and I stumbled onto Whatsapp in the process (who I have a pending data protection complaint with) and for the first time ever it asked me for feedback.

    Specifically about Meta, not Whatsapp. They seemed very concerned with their image, and especially their image in AI and VR fields. Had I heard of this? What do I think of that? Where would I rate Meta for this? and so on. About 20-something questions.

    I can safely say that I answered absolutely honestly and yet... every an

  • Still around, dead or dying ? Something I never tried.

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