Meta is Permanently Shuttering the VR Version of ‘Horizon Worlds’ in June

By
Scott Hayden
-
23

Last month, Meta announced Horizon Worlds was going “almost exclusively mobile”, which included removing Worlds suggestions and generally deemphasizing the immersive social platform on Quest. Now, the company says it’s pulling the plug on Quest support entirely in June.

Update (March 19th, 2026): Contrary to its previous announcement, Meta has now revealed that some experiences will still be accessible on Quest—specifically those based on the Unity game engine and not the new in-house Horizon Engine. Check out this article for the full details.

The original article follows below:

Released in 2021, Horizon Worlds was meant to be Meta’s flagship metaverse app, essentially serving as the impetus for its rebranding away from Facebook and Oculus. The platform struggled early on with low retention though, which translated to limited appeal among VR users, prompting Meta to open it up to mobile users in 2023.

Now, Meta announced via its official Discord (invite) that come March 31st, Horizon Worlds and Events will no longer appear in the Store on Quest. This is said to include the removal of Horizon Central, Events Arena, Kaiju, and Bobber Bay worlds from Quest access.

Image courtesy Meta

What’s more, come June 15th, Meta is removing the Horizon Worlds app entirely from Quest, which means that worlds will no longer be available in VR in any capacity after that date.

Additionally, Meta is removing its spatial ‘Hyperscape’ captures from Horizon Worlds come March 24th. “Your existing captures will remain viewable within the Hyperscape Capture (Beta) app, which is available in your Quest app library,” Meta says. “You can continue capturing new Hyperscapes, but sharing, inviting, and co-experiencing Hyperscapes with others will no longer be supported.”

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Notably, Meta shuttered its work-focused Horizon Workrooms platform last month, which allowed Quest and non-Quest users to interact in an immersive environment.

This comes amid a wider shift in Reality Labs, which recently saw layoffs affecting 10 percent of the XR division in addition to the closure of three first-party XR studios which resulted in multiple game cancellations.

Meta has said it’s still funding third-party titles in addition to its current plans to release two new VR headsets, which include a possible successor to Quest 3 as well as a thin and light headset that tethers to a compute puck.

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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.
  • psuedonymous

    Oh no!
    Anyway…

  • UNDE4DLY

    That's a shame. So how about those Yankees or whatever

  • XRC

    Latest reports mention incoming 20% company wide redundancies with AI specifically mentioned (this is typically AI washing to blame technology for job losses).

    • Christian Schildwaechter

      But this time they aren't saying that those 20% will be let go because AI can do their job just as well. Instead Meta is saying they have to cut costs due to their enormous investments into AI draining their financial resources while not (yet) paying off.

      Now a sane mind might suggest keeping the 20% employees that got Meta to trillion dollar value and more than 3B daily active users, and not burning that much money on AI. The current AI bubble is driven by hype though, not sane mind, so obviously they will invest even more into AI.

      Meta's stock went down 23% after the announcement, certainly not because they were firing 16,000 people, but because they also delayed the release of their latest AI model and are apparently trailing behind Google's Gemini and others.

      • XRC

        As reported (independent), Zuckerberg's comments re latest layoffs:

        "He also said that he is now seeing projects that used to require big teams now be accomplished by a single, very talented person."

        • SFMike

          Sounds like a greedy billionaire.

  • Tech

    Damn losers. Instead of supporting VRChat they decided to promote their Meta Horizon. Kick out Bosworth from there. He failed miserably.

  • JakeDunnegan

    As much as I barely used it, and I definitely didn't like the bloatware nature of it…I can't say that I wanted it just GONE. There was a lot of stuff in there that was kinda neat.

  • SFMike

    Hyperscape captures that were shareable was the first really excellent use on Horizon that was fun and useful but now they are killing it when it wasn't even out of Beta. These greedy morons can't do anything right. The whole Horizon project was mismanaged from the start and always was more centered on the impossibility of creating a totally safe space and wasting millions coming up with the original non-binary avatars that made everyone look like dowdy overweight women. Fun never came into to it as the main goal seemed to be coming up with ways to report activity and language that made women "uncomfortable" which never actually worked anyway. I spent way to much time creating spaces here with no payoff. All users wanted was a Second Life/Sims type world in VR to play in but got neither. It was fun early on when creative adults were helping each other learn the ropes but once it was opened up to kids it was just a nasty mess that they seem to think will be a flat screen success. It never ran better or was as fun as Rec Room even after spending billions on it. Hopefully someone will be able to create a Hyperspace like standalone project using gaussian splatting not linked to this colossal failure.

    • Sven Viking

      Apparently they’re keeping Hyperscape as a separate app. Not sure what features it will and won’t support.

      • SFMike

        They have already said and captures will not be shareable of downloadable so it's just a useless well designed gaussian splatting tool. They should sell it to someone who cares and can develop it for the VR community other wise it's just more wasted money, the one thing Meta excels at. This is the kind of terrific app that Meta usually buys then shelves although this time it was all done in-house but the result is the same particularly as they don't care about VR anymore. Zuckerburg is moving to Florida and working on his image as a right wing billionaire as left wing California Democrats want to tax the greedy billionaire set so his eye is only on the profit and power ball and AI glasses are the holly grail of getting ads plastered in your field of view 24/7.

    • Christian Schildwaechter

      They dropped the white board feature from Horizon Workrooms, which many considered its best/sole good feature, long before dropping workrooms itself, and at one point killed shared video watching in one of their pre-Horizon social space attempts, again cutting the function users liked the most. So dropping the one thing that made Horizon World still useful to you is just them being consequent in ignoring what their users actually want to use.

  • Sven Viking

    I was always a detractor of Horizon Worlds, so I agree with the shift in focus (away from HW, that is, not away from VR). I’m also not fond of the way Meta will often put massive focus onto something and then burn it to the ground rather than putting it on life support or just leaving it to fend for itself, though. Dozens (actually many thousands) of players were baited or bludgeoned into putting time/money into Worlds in VR, and now it’s being not so much abandoned as actually ripped away from them.

    • Christian Schildwaechter

      There are some valid arguments for killing underperforming projects rather than keeping them alive, even is they don't lose money, and it is usually about focus and binding engineering sources that would be better used for more promising ventures. One option is often to sell off that section of the business to someone more interested in a long term, slow growth approach. It is much harder to justify keeping a project running after it no longer serves some company growth plans if it is also losing money, which usually means you cannot even sell it.

      The sole people that now shutting down Horizon Worlds VR will anger are a subsection of Quest users, with most being more glad to be rid of it. But VR itself is now no longer part of Meta's growth plans, so annoying some of its users comes at little cost. First saying they'll keep Horizon Worlds around on VR and then shortly after unceremoniously killing it of course doesn't bode well for their promise to keep developing VR and supporting 3rd party developers.

  • ⊗ ᯅ ∞

    The only reason for Quest and VR to exist at Meta was to enable something like Horizon Worlds.

    Zuck wanted his own platform, because he was tired of getting kicked around on Apple and Google mobile platforms. He wanted it to be social at its foundations and figured VR was the differentiating hardware angle.

    So, Quest+HW, was the goal from the beginning. Everything else, the AAA game studios, third party subsidies, etc. was just to lure people to Quest to get them into HW.

    Without Horizon Wolds for VR, Quest is meaningless at Meta.

    The only maybe salvageable parts are HW software, if it can stand up on mobile, and some Quest hardware, if it can be repurposed as a "big screen" or "virtual monitor" device. Actual VR use cases never got enough traction but using goggles, ideally lightweight and comfortable as big screens shows promise and doesn't require a whole PC on your face.

    AAA games weren't enough to grow a meaningful Quest VR audience and HW wasn't compelling enough to get even a fraction of the VR gamers into a space Zuck actually cares about.

    Now we'll get to sit back and see if HW mobile or Phoenix hardware can get any traction. I doubt it, but that's all that's left to try before winding the whole thing down, probably claiming AI/AR glasses no more powerful than your car's media center, were the goal all along, and Quest+HW were just stepping stones. That's complete nonsense, of course, but it's what I expect them to tell Wall St. to excuse the one hundred billion dollar goggles boondoggle.

  • Rayza

    As trash as it was this is just more evidence of how cooked VR is for now. They were the only company pumping money into VR and they've as good as given up. Hopefully it can make a comeback when hardware advances and we can get impressive visuals in small, stand alone glasses/HMDs. I just don't see any positivity for VR in the short term, who's making games with any sort of decent budget? It's a shame as i've owned 6 headsets and been a fan since i got a Vive but it's in a sorry state.

    Seems crazy to me how many billions they pumped into VR then gave up before the hardware advanced enough for mainstream adoption to be realistic, it was never going to take off with the awful cheap mobile graphics on a bulky headset with LCD.

    • NL_VR

      There are many good games out there and will release in full versions this year.
      You my friend need to open your eyes :)

      • philingreat

        Those games have been in development for years

        • NL_VR

          Yes? which games? Game take time to develop, especially if you are a small studio

  • Leisure Suit Barry

    Great news!

  • xyzs

    Yes!! Less bullcrap is always a win.

    Horizon should be an agnostic OS where every app on it is treated equally (even system ones should be listed as any other ones with the only difference that they cannot be uninstalled).

    That all what users want from an os, to be a platform, not to be an ad with shitty lame stuff forced upon our asses.

  • NL_VR

    Horizon World was always the VRChat wannabe.. it is so bad and i welcome its removal… people who mourn it can continuie on mobile or actually get som real VR games.

  • Oxi

    I am glad to see it die. The metaverse was only ever going to be a possible dystopia.