Horizon Worlds Keeps VR Support After a Last-Minute Reversal — But Meta's Metaverse Is Still in Crisis
Meta reversed course on shutting down Horizon Worlds for VR headsets, confirming the social app will continue running on Quest devices. The decision came just hours after the company had publicly announced a move to web and mobile only. But while the app lives to see another day in VR, the bigger story is one of a $73 billion gamble that has yet to pay off.
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| Credit: Meta |
A Reversal That Surprised Everyone — Including Meta
The announcement came through an unusual channel: an Instagram Stories Q&A session. Meta's CTO Andrew Bosworth addressed a fan who described themselves as "heartbroken" over the earlier decision to pull Horizon Worlds from VR headsets. Bosworth's response was direct — the company had changed its mind, effective immediately.
"We have decided, just today in fact, that we will keep Horizon Worlds working in VR," Bosworth said. A Meta spokesperson confirmed the statement, making the reversal official. It was a rare and candid moment of real-time corporate course correction, played out on social media for all to see.
What makes the reversal remarkable is the speed. Earlier that same Tuesday, Meta had posted on its community forums that Horizon Worlds would transition to web and mobile only starting June 15. Within hours, that announcement was walked back entirely. It is the kind of whiplash that raises questions about how decisions are made inside one of the world's most powerful tech companies.
The Metaverse Dream That Turned Into a Money Pit
Even with Horizon Worlds surviving on VR, the broader context is difficult to ignore. Meta's Reality Labs division — the home of all things metaverse — has lost $73 billion since 2021, the year the company rebranded from Facebook and bet its identity on virtual reality. To put that figure in perspective, you would need to spend one million dollars every single day for 200 years to burn through the same amount.
That level of investment has not translated into mainstream adoption. Very few people, it turns out, actually want to socialize inside a virtual reality headset. The original vision of Horizon Worlds — a bustling, avatar-filled social space at the center of a new digital era — never materialized in the way Meta had imagined.
Reality Labs also covers augmented reality products like smart glasses and some artificial intelligence research, so not every dollar lost can be attributed to VR alone. But the scale of the losses is staggering by any measure, and the division continues to be a significant drag on Meta's financials.
Headset Sales Are Falling and the Competition Is Not Helping
The hardware side of the metaverse story is equally sobering. Quest headset sales dropped 16% year-over-year from 2024 to 2025, according to market intelligence data. That decline makes it increasingly hard to argue that VR hardware is on a trajectory to challenge the smartphone as the dominant personal computing platform.
Meta is not alone in struggling here. The Vision Pro headset from a major competitor launched at a price of $3,500 and had to scale back production due to lower-than-expected demand. If two of the most resource-rich technology companies in the world cannot make VR a mass-market product, it raises serious questions about whether the technology is simply not ready — or whether consumer appetite for it is genuinely limited.
The broader VR industry had hoped that better hardware, more compelling content, and stronger social features would eventually tip the market. So far, that tipping point has not arrived. The metaverse remains a concept that excites technologists far more than it excites everyday users.
Layoffs and Studio Closures Signal a Strategic Retreat
Meta has responded to the ongoing struggles with significant cuts. In January, the company made layoffs within Reality Labs that affected more than 1,500 employees. Several game studios were shut down as part of the same restructuring. For workers who had spent years building experiences for the metaverse, the message was clear: the era of unlimited investment is over.
Reports have since suggested that another round of layoffs is being considered internally — one that could affect as much as 20% of the company. That would represent a much broader reckoning beyond just the VR division. Whether or not those cuts materialize, the direction of travel is unmistakable. Meta is pulling back from its most ambitious metaverse bets and refocusing its resources where it sees stronger returns.
This is a significant shift for a company that once changed its name to signal total commitment to a virtual future. The rebrand to Meta was never subtle — it was a declaration of intent. What is happening now looks less like a pivot and more like a partial retreat.
Mobile Is Where the Real Growth Is — For Now
Despite the VR struggles, Horizon Worlds has found something resembling traction in an unexpected place: the mobile app. The app has been downloaded 45 million times worldwide across iOS and Android, with 1.5 million of those downloads happening in 2026 alone. That represents a 53% increase compared to the same period in the previous year, when the app had logged roughly 983,000 downloads at this point in the calendar.
Bosworth has been open about why the company is prioritizing mobile. He noted in a podcast conversation that the app had better product-market fit on phones, where the audience is vastly larger. He also pointed out the practical challenge of building for both platforms simultaneously — every feature has to be built twice, once for mobile and once for VR, which slows down the team's overall pace of development.
"There's a much bigger audience in mobile, and it's having a really positive pickup on mobile," Bosworth said. The implication is clear: mobile is where Horizon Worlds can actually grow, and VR is, for now, a secondary priority despite the reversal on shutting it down.
The Revenue Gap That No One Can Ignore
Here is where the mobile success story gets complicated. Despite 45 million total downloads, consumer spending on the Horizon Worlds mobile app amounts to approximately $1.1 million in total. That is not $1.1 million per month or per quarter — that is the cumulative total across the app's entire lifespan.
For a company that has spent tens of billions building the metaverse ecosystem, $1.1 million in consumer revenue is essentially nothing. It is a number so small relative to the investment that it almost defies comparison. Downloads are an encouraging metric, but downloads do not pay for data centers, engineering teams, or the salaries of the thousands of people who have worked on this platform.
For Horizon Worlds to justify continued investment — on mobile or in VR — Meta will need to find a way to convert its growing user base into actual spending. Whether that comes through in-app purchases, virtual goods, advertising, or some other monetization model remains to be seen. The app's growth trajectory on mobile is real, but the business case for it is still unproven.
What Comes Next for Meta's Virtual Ambitions
The decision to keep Horizon Worlds alive on VR is ultimately a small story within a much larger one. Meta has spent years and billions building toward a version of the future where people work, socialize, and play in virtual spaces. What it has instead is a mobile app with healthy download numbers but minimal revenue, a VR platform with declining headset sales, and a division that has lost more money than most countries spend in a year.
Keeping Horizon Worlds on Quest is not a sign of renewed confidence in VR — it is a concession to the users who still care, and a way to avoid the reputational damage of a full retreat. The real bet is on mobile, and even there, the company is still waiting for evidence that its metaverse vision can translate into a sustainable business.
The metaverse is not dead. But the version of it that Meta imagined in 2021 — immersive, social, VR-first, and ubiquitous — looks further away than ever. What remains is something more modest: a mobile app, a headset that fewer people are buying, and a company still searching for the return on one of the most expensive bets in the history of consumer technology.
