Mark Zuckerberg is shutting down Horizon Worlds, the company’s virtual reality social app for Quest headsets in the Metaverse.
In a community note, Meta announced that the Horizon Worlds app will be removed from the Quest store at the end of March, and fully removed from VR headsets on June 15, 2026.
The news comes after Zuckerberg spent $80 billion investing in the Metaverse.
Zuckerberg announced the Metaverse in October 2021 with a slick marketing campaign. He was so confident in the Metaverse that he rebranded Facebook as “Meta.”
“From now on, we’re going to be metaverse-first, not Facebook-first,” Zuckerberg said at the time. “Our mission remains the same — it’s still about bringing people together.”
Zuckerberg said, “we will effectively transition from people seeing us as primarily being a social media company to being a metaverse company.”
But Metaverse ran into some trouble. The much-hyped Metaverse avatars didn’t have any legs and Metaverse’s graphics left a lot to be desired.
In February 2022 a woman claimed she was “virtually gang raped” by other players in the Metaverse.
Nina Jane Patel shared her harrowing experience of sexual harassment in a post on Medium.com.
Patel said within 60 seconds of joining the Metaverse she was “verbally and sexually harassed” by 3-4 male avatars, with male voices, who “virtually gang raped my avatar and took photos.”
Zuckerberg laid off 11,000 workers by the summer of 2022.
Meta is planning to lay off another 20% of its workforce to reflect a growing trend toward AI in the tech industry.
But Meta engineers don’t have much confidence in their own AI, so they’re using Google’s Gemini.
Zuckerberg plans to invest $600 billion into artificial intelligence by 2028.
“They will absorb AI into everything,” a former AI ads engineer wrote in a Reddit.com subforum.
