Meta Is Removing VR From Its Game ‘Horizon Worlds’.
Meta just announced dramatic changes to its 3D social platform, Horizon Worlds. The company is eliminating Meta Quest users to focus on mobile users. Thus, Horizon Worlds, originally a VR-only platform and now a mix of VR and mobile users, will become a mobile-only platform in the near future. In a blog post addressed to developers, Samantha Ryan, VP of Content at Meta’s Reality Labs, stated that the company is “separating our Quest VR platform from our Worlds platform to create more space for both products to grow.”
“We’re investing heavily in the VR developer ecosystem while shifting Worlds’ focus almost exclusively to mobile. By splitting the project into two distinct platforms, we’ll be able to focus more clearly on each,” Ryan wrote.
Announced in 2019 as a “social virtual reality world” called Facebook Horizon, the platform was renamed Horizon Worlds two years later and became an integral part of Meta’s vision for a future “Metaverse,” but Worlds never caught on with users. Despite Facebook/Meta’s significant investment in the platform, its monthly user base in 2022 was only around 200,000 .
Meta pledges its continued commitment to virtual reality.
According to Ryan, 86% of the time people spend in their VR headsets is spent on third-party apps, so it’s no surprise that Meta has abandoned its own VR game development. Last month, the company shuttered three of its AAA VR game development companies, stopped updating its subscription fitness app Supernatural , and laid off about 10% of its Reality Labs division. Ryan says Meta will continue to support third-party VR game developers and release hardware, promising that the company has a “robust roadmap for future VR headsets” targeting “different audience segments,” but hasn’t yet provided any specific details.
Meta is a mobile-focused company.
While this change definitively marks the end of Horizon Worlds as a VR-first platform, the company plans to leverage Meta’s massive Instagram and Facebook user base to make Worlds competitive with social platforms like Roblox . The company reports a fourfold increase in Horizon mobile users by 2025. “We are in a strong position to launch synchronous social games at scale,” Ryan wrote.
A sad end for Worlds VR game users.
There are approximately five billion smartphone users worldwide, all of whom are potential Worlds customers, compared to approximately 20-30 million Quest users. So the math certainly seems logical in terms of platform growth and stock price, but it’s unfortunate for the (relatively few) people who have found a home in Horizon Worlds . They’ll be able to use the mobile platform, but it’s not the same: the sense of scale and immersion can’t be replicated on a small 2D screen. I recently spent a lot of time exploring the VR version of Worlds , and it’s a unique place, an uncharted land where strange little communities have settled in a vast, abandoned mall. If you have a chance, put on a headset and wander around for a bit before the power goes out.