Meta has announced plans to shut down its virtual reality (VR) platform Horizon Worlds as the company continues to pivot away from the metaverse.
The platform was envisaged as the primary online social hub for users to access through Meta’s series of Quest VR headsets. It also supported user-created content including environments and games.
Meta spent an estimated $70bn to $80bn on its metaverse division, which was responsible for developing Horizon Worlds, as well as the associated hardware needed to access it. It was released in December 2021 following broad proclamations from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg that it would be the “next frontier” in human connection and could even reach around one billion people by the end of the decade.
The launch saw a modicum of success, attracting somewhere between 200,000 and 500,000 monthly users throughout 2022. Reports suggest that user interest started to slowly ebb away through 2023, and Meta laid off 1,500 people in its metaverse division earlier this...