Meta to Keep Existing ‘Horizon Worlds’ VR Experiences on Life Support for Time Being

By
Scott Hayden
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Meta previously announced it was shuttering the VR version of Horizon Worlds, but now it seems the company has changed course, revealing that some experiences will still be accessible on Quest moving forward.

Meta said earlier this week that it was removing Horizon Worlds and Events from the Store on Quest on March 31st, and shutting down VR access to the app entirely by June 15th—essentially making it a flatscreen-only experience for mobile and PC.

Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth took to Instagram yesterday in one of his usual Q&A sessions though to announce that some worlds will, in fact, remain VR-accessible for the time being.

Image courtesy Andrew Bosworth

“We have decided, just today in fact, that we will keep Horizon Worlds working in VR for existing games to support the fans that’ve reached out […], who really care about that,” Bosworth says.

According to Bosworth’s statement, it appears Horizon Worlds legacy worlds will be VR-only, suggesting that it’s going to be a hard platform split.

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“The Horizon Unity runtime games—they’re not going to work on mobile, they’ll just be working in VR. We’re not bringing new games. Again, most of our energy is going towards mobile and the Meta Horizon Engine there. The reason for that is that’s where most of the consumer and creator energy already was, and so we’re kind of leaning into that,” Bosworth says, noting that the legacy version of Horizon Worlds app will be VR-accessible for “the foreseeable future.”

Notably, all of Horizon Worlds was based on the Unity game engine from its 2021 launch up until very recently. At Connect 2025 last September, Meta announced that its own Horizon Engine would be replacing Unity, which is said to speed up loading times and allow “well over 100” users in a single space.

At the time of this writing, Meta hasn’t released more detailed plans on how it’s going to accomplish the platform split. We’ll update this article as soon as we know more.

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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.
  • NL_VR

    No we dont need it, you can safely remove it all so i dont have to see anything "Horizon" when i start my Quest.
    i want the new (Horizon free) UI

    • Nothing to see here

      I was going to argue but yeah, a Horizon free UI would be nice.

  • Christian Schildwaechter

    TL;DR: Horizon Worlds VR was effectively killed in early 2025 when Meta dropped the requirement to also support Quest.

    This will be mostly damage control, in response to reports of Meta cutting off Horizon Worlds VR users despite claiming shortly before that they'd keep it in maintenance mode. And probably not even to calm the rather low number of Quest Horizon World users, but to prevent people from asking about the credibility of Meta's other promises, like releasing more VR HMDs and supporting third party VR developers.

    In effect they killed Horizon Worlds VR in early 2025, when they allowed the creation of mobile-only worlds, even if this wasn't their intention back then. But they posted a blog entry in late 2025 saying that due to this change, Horizon Worlds monthly user numbers had quadrupled, with in-game sales raising 250%, so it got a lot better reception on phones, mostly due to there being a lot more phone than HMD users.

    They also reported that 5000 new mobile-only worlds had been created in 2025. Their justification for going mobile-first in early 2026 was the extra cost and difficulty for creating experiences that work in both VR and on phones. But by that time developers had already voted with their feet, moving away from Quest and towards phones with much better growth and income perspective. Switching to their new and better engine was just the final nail in the coffin, but functionally Horizon Worlds VR was going down long before that.

    Keeping the VR-only worlds alive on Quest, but limiting previously VR+mobile worlds to now only phones is kind of consequent. This way everybody can still visit the worlds they like, you may just have to use a phone instead of a Quest now. They can push all the mobile worlds onto the new engine, and keep the much smaller number of VR-only worlds in a mostly frozen state at marginal costs for running a few servers. These will require no more updates, because they will no longer connect to any mobile-only worlds still receiving changes that might require updates of the older Quest Horizon Worlds version based on Unity too.

    The sole people truly screwed are developers that wanted to create Worlds esp. for VR, then later added mobile support, and now are forced to go mobile-only, unless there is a way to switch a world back to VR-only before the deadline. Effectively Horizon World VR will be turned into a museum. We'll have to see if they allow devs to still update existing VR-only worlds, or if they pull another Oculus Go. There they not only ended hardware sales after just two years, but also stopped devs from even updating/fixing their apps, while still selling them for several years on their store. They pointed to Go compatibility on the Quest 1, which they then removed on Quest 2 again for no particular reason. I'm still pissed about that, just like I'm still pissed about them shutting down Oculus Share in May 2016 without warning. Share, started in 2013, had been the main hub for early VR experiments on DK1/DK2, and shutting it down in anticipation of the upcoming Oculus store for Rift took tons of VR history with it that was available nowhere else. They basically burned down the largest public VR library, because they wanted to open a new bookstore.

    Meta has repeatedly proven to do a very horrible job at preserving VR experiences or keeping up services, so I wouldn't bet on the just resurrected VR-only Quest Horizon Worlds to have a long life-span either, even though the costs for Meta should be pretty much negligible. And we had plenty of warnings to not rely on Meta supporting projects that no longer match their expectations.

    Move fast and break things.

    Early Facebook company motto by Mark Zuckerberg, very obviously still in use

  • Ben Raubenolt

    I wonder who these mobile users are that are playing this instead of Roblox or RecRoom. Metal should have made Horizon Worlds a 3D movie theater. That would have brought people in.