Meta decides not to close Horizon Worlds on VR after all

According to an Instagram post from Meta’s CTO Andrew Bosworth, Meta won’t be shutting down VR support for Horizon Worlds after all, which should come as a huge relief to about five people.

“We decided, just today actually, that we will continue to do Horizon Worlds in VR,” Bosworth said as part of a Q&A on Instagram Stories after a fan of the app reached out to say they were “sad” about the decision.

A Meta spokesperson confirmed Bosworth’s comments to TechCrunch.

Meta indicated earlier this year that it would stop supporting the Social Metaverse app on Quest VR headsets, which was a major concession to an app that Meta once envisioned as central to social networking in VR. As it turned out, very few people wanted to spend time in VR. On Tuesday, Meta confirmed in its community forums that Horizon Worlds would move to web and mobile only on June 15, but that announcement was quickly retracted.

Even if Horizon Worlds now remains available via Quest, the fact that the Meta planned to shut it down is proof enough that the Metaverse – or at least as it was imagined in VR – turned out to be just a black hole where Reality Labs’ funding ran out. This division of Meta has lost $73 billion since 2021, the year it was rebranded from Facebook. As we noted earlier, you would have to spend $1 million a day for 200 years to spend that kind of money. (Reality Labs also accounts for spending on augmented reality products like smart glasses, as well as some AI research.)

According to IDC, a technology market intelligence firm, sales of the Meta’s Quest headsets fell 16% year over year from 2024 to 2025, making it unlikely that these devices will compete meaningfully with a smartphone. It’s not just Meta that has struggled to make VR compelling: Apple has had to cut back production of its $3,500 Vision Pro headset due to low demand.

Meta responded to this decline by making significant cuts to its Reality Labs division in January, affecting more than 1,500 employees, and closing several game studios. Rumor has it that Meta is considering another, more significant round of layoffs, which could affect 20% of the company.

Although the Meta will continue to support Horizon Worlds for the Quest headset, the company still plans to prioritize the mobile experience. Bosworth said in a podcast with journalist Alex Heath that Horizon had shifted its focus to mobile because it was a better fit for the product market there.

“There is a much larger audience in the mobile space, and this app is seeing really positive growth on mobile,” Bosworth said of the app. “[The team] It’s having to build everything twice – they build it once for mobile, they build it again for VR. “There’s a really easy way to get them up to speed, and it’s like letting them design for mobile.”

Mobile intelligence firm Appfigures told TechCrunch that the Horizon Worlds mobile app has seen a total of 45 million downloads worldwide across iOS and Google Play, with 1.5 million downloads so far in 2026. That’s a 53% year-over-year increase compared to last year, when the Horizon Worlds app had about 983,000 downloads at this point.

However, Appfigures estimates that consumers only spent $1.1 million of total consumer spending on the app, which is a small amount compared to the amount of Meta’s investment in the metaverse.

Bosworth is right that there’s more opportunity for Horizon Worlds on mobile than on Quest headsets – but Meta will need to see more consumer spending on the app to prove a worthwhile investment.