Meta is Deleting ‘Horizon Workrooms’ Next Month as Metaverse Ambitions Cool

By
Scott Hayden
-
15

Meta announced it’s discontinuing Horizon Workrooms next month, its productivity-focused VR platform, marking another step in the company’s ongoing restructuring of its VR and metaverse strategy.

Originally launched in 2021 on Quest 2, Workrooms was not only the company’s answer to remote work following the COVID-19 pandemic, but also a first big push to make the Quest platform into a productivity device.

The platform allows up to 50 total participants to interact in a shared space, which includes a mix of 16 Quest users (max) and users patching in through standard video calls.

Image courtesy Meta

Amid a drastic budget reduction in VR and metaverse though, which has seen the closure of three internal XR game studios and a reported 10 percent of Reality Labs laid off, Workrooms is also getting the boot next month.

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“Workrooms showed how Meta Horizon can help bring people together to work, collaborate and connect. Meta Horizon has since developed into a social platform that supports a wide range of productivity apps and tools,” Meta says in a Horizon Workrooms help thread. “As a result, Meta has made the decision to discontinue Workrooms as a standalone app, effective February 16, 2026.”

For existing users, Meta has not announced a direct replacement for Workrooms; the company suggests users look into third-party apps such as Arthur, Microsoft Teams Immersive and Zoom Workplace.

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Scott Hayden
Well before the first modern XR products hit the market, Scott recognized the potential of the technology and set out to understand and document its growth. He has been professionally reporting on the space for nearly a decade as Editor at Road to VR, authoring more than 4,000 articles on the topic. Scott brings that seasoned insight to his reporting from major industry events across the globe.
  • Nevets

    When Oculus held the future of early VR and VR awareness in its hands, everything felt really exciting, like the herald of a new dawn. As soon as Facebook bought Oculus, it seemed obvious that their gameplan diverted in an entirely different direction. It was just a case of waiting to see how far they made a hash of the dream. As it turned out, they did a lot of wonderful stuff, but their top brass are f*cking morons. I wonder if they will have the respect to tell their consumer users what happens next.

    • Octogod

      With Rift they learned the PC gaming audience would never drive mainstream adoption.

      With Gear VR they learned that a free pack-in with a major global player only breeds low interest, especially if the setup and interaction is cumbersome.

      With Go they learned that a low cost viewing only device is not wanted by the mainstream.

      With Quest they aimed for 6dof standalone gaming and found a niche. When they tried expanding this broader the audience would buy, but then never come back. It was a weekend object, when Meta wanted a daily part of a user's lives. Most users engage with media to relax, and VR is active. So, kids picked up the devices and found digital playgrounds.

      The challenge is that wearable glasses achieve everything they wanted from VR. Low cost, high adoption, used often, that appeals to many. The added plus is that it integrates well into their social sharing apps, while also feeding the data collected directly back to Meta for marketing and ad uses. It is a dream product, after the endless marathon of VR.

      I hate this timeline, but I think they are right that if they want a billion users on their hardware, it won't be VR.

      • sfmike

        And being a predatory capitalist company the only goal is continued growth and profit for their investors because that's the only reason they exist now. Get people's heads out of their phones and onto their faces during their waking hours to speed up brain rot with the algorithms and increase ad revenue and the gathering of saleable info on every user. Yes the perfect product to insure the masses can be even more controlled and exploited by their billionaire masters.

  • Christian Schildwaechter

    Facebook's early motto was "move fast and break things". It seems we are now firmly in the breaking things phase.

    • Herbert Werters

      Let it burn down. Then new and better things can emerge.

  • Arturs Gerskovics

    The Great Exodus has begun

  • JanO

    While I appreciate what Meta has done for VR in general, they have been incredibly clumsy in their overall strategy… As a "data driven company", they never understood that their usual ways can't work with something NEW that has a VERY SMALL user base.

    VR needs a company with balls, a spine and espescially, a vision…

    55 years old VR software company COO here. Always felt Meta was just as unreliable as Google when it was time to invest in their platforms, but we still did, for lack of a better option. The main thing is companies need to have faith in the platform provider's commitment. Just as Google, Meta has demonstrated the are only commited to themselves…

    Zuck, Boz, if you wanna talk… ; )

    • sfmike

      They are only committed to quarterly profits and would rather replace working with you to working with AI.

  • Rogue Transfer

    This isn't good news for the planned Phoenix headset next year. With Phoenix's main purposes being for productivity and media viewing, Meta's just pulled the rug from their own productivity Workrooms here.

    I'm beginning to think Phoenix is likely to end up cancelled, after being delayed until next year for not being reliable or polished enough to release. Just like Meta cancelled Pismo Low & High Quest 4 prototypes last year to restart a new Quest 4 prototype this year(also now in doubt with their closing half their game studios & reducing the rest to skeleton staffing numbers of a "handful of people" for their premiere game studio).

    Since Meta no longer have the productivity side for Phoenix, that just leaves media viewing, and we know not many people are going to pay ~$800 to put on a bulky pair of VR glasses just to watch media(see 3D glasses' failure). Especially since Phoenix isn't planned to come with controllers and rely on hand-tracking, so again, not aimed at gaming, the core use case for all VR devices.

    Will Phoenix rise from these ashes in 18 months? Seems likely it'll be cut before then, as Meta switches more focus to smart-glasses.

    • Christian Schildwaechter

      TL;DR: Horizon Workrooms is way less important for a productivity HMD than access to flat apps, and Valve may have just opened a door here for Meta with SteamOS now running on ARM with support for Windows x86 apps, so Meta may decide to make Phoenix compatible with Windows apps..

      Horizon Workrooms was more virtual conferencing born out of everybody jumping onto Zoom calls during CoViD-19, not really productivity use, which is now mostly understood as running non-gaming flat apps in VR, ideally enhanced to better work in XR with something like Meta's Spatial SDK, not just flat windows like they now appear for sideloaded Android APKs on Quest.

      So dropping Horizon Workrooms doesn't necessarily mean there will be no more use case for a Meta productivity focused HMD like Phoenix, positioned more against AVP and GXR. Their main problem has always been access to a store with flat apps, as the most obvious choice, Google's Playstore, meant giving all software revenue for both flat and XR apps to Google, killing Meta's whole Quest business model.

      Setting up their own store wouldn't have worked, they'd need to partner with an existing large player to become a serious contender in XR productivity use. And Valve might have just opened a previously closed door for them thanks to Frame running SteamOS on ARM with both WINE/Proton for running Windows apps/games, and FEX for running x86 on ARM. This was technically already possible with Wine for Android plus Box64 emulation, or tools like Winlator packaging both into more user friendly bundles, but FEX and recent Valve improvements seem to work a lot faster.

      Meta has been partnered with Microsoft for some time, but so far nothing came out of that besides some Office 365 running in a Quest browser demos plus an Xbox branded Quest 3S produced in so low numbers it sold out instantly. But now they could go and run apps from Microsoft's UWP store, ideally native Windows ARM versions, but in a case of doubt x86 binaries too. Microsoft may not be too happy about using WINE, but they already embraced Linux on desktop with WSL since Windows 10, and supported Mono, Ximian's FOSS implementation of their .Net framework, so they'd probably fine with this too.

      Microsoft doesn't seem eager to directly engage in XR again, but was willing to partner with Meta on it. They are also trying to push Windows on ARM, so they might go for it. And there would be no conflict like with Google with both companies offering XR apps and demanding all sales to go through their store. Microsoft has been going the "everything is an Xbox" road for some time, and Xbox and Windows are supposed to mostly merge, so they'd probably be fine with Phoenix also being an ARM Windows machine too.

      Whether this actually happens is very questionable, and currently Meta just canceling Phoenix seems more likely. But I'd expect them to keep that door open just in case, simply because smartglasses won't be able to replace much more powerful XR HMDs for a very long time, and currently lack viable business models. Apple will very likely come out with a much lighter and cheaper Vision Air, even if it is delayed due to them now rushing to counter Meta with their own smartglasses. If they were considering canceling it, all their ongoing investments into things like live immersive streaming of Laker games wouldn't make sense, as these are extremely expensive to set up. And most AVP users very much like the HMD at least as a media device, with the main criticism being about weight and the outrageous price. So we may see a second generation of productivity focused HMDs with much more acceptable ergonomics and prices, and Meta will not want to accidentally have dropped the ball when they were already in the lead position.

  • Sofian

    At this point I wonder if there ll ever be a Quest 4…

    • Octogod

      It was rebooted end of 2025.

      Early 2026 most major initiatives cancelled and they can't keep up with glasses demand? Quest 4 is absolutely done.

  • Peter vasseur

    When you build your company on fake subsidies, because of a fake pandemic. You’re the kind of idiot, that stole your way into meta because you’re too stupid to figure it out. Looking at you mark suck a dike.

    • Octogod

      If you want a real ride, read Peter's Disqus history. One world order. Paid protests. Yet, equal hate for everyone. It's a damn impressive level of cognitive gymnastics.

  • Oxi

    Victory over the bad timeline!