When Mark Zuckerberg rebranded Facebook to Meta in 2021, he pitched the metaverse as the company’s future — calling it “the next frontier” and saying he wanted to anchor the company’s identity to the metaverse. Less than five years later, the virtual world at the centre of Meta’s ambitious gamble is on the verge of shutting down.
Mark Zuckerberg and Meta are scaling back their metaverse ambitions — the company announced in a blog post yesterday that the Horizon Worlds app will be removed from the Quest store at the end of March, and fully removed from VR on June 15. After that, it will only be available on a standalone mobile app.
“We are separating the two platforms so each can grow with greater focus, and the Horizon Worlds platform will become a mobile-only experience,” the company said in announcing the change.
The development comes just weeks after Meta cut over 1,000 jobs at Reality Labs, the division overseeing its metaverse efforts.
An ambitious bet
In 2021, Facebook changed its name to Meta in a sign of the company’s commitment to the metaverse.
The metaverse was imagined as a shared, virtual digital world where people interact with each other and digital environments in real time using avatars.
(Also read: Explained: What is metaverse which Facebook is touting as the future of internet)
“Our hope is that within the next decade, the metaverse will reach a billion people, host hundreds of billions of dollars of digital commerce, and support jobs for millions of creators and developers,” Zuckerberg wrote in a 2021 blog post announcing the pivot to metaverse.
However, Horizon Worlds struggled to find users. CNBC reported that the platform never had more than a couple hundred thousand active users a month.
Losses touch $80 billion
Reality Labs, the Meta division responsible for VR and metaverse development, has accumulated nearly $80 billion in losses since 2020, CNBC had reported in January this year.
The layoffs at Reality Labs, also in early January, came as the company began to shift resources from virtual reality to artificial intelligence and wearable devices.
News of the metaverse shutdown, coupled with the staggering $80 billion figure, led to surprised reactions on social media.
“I forgot about this stupid s*** but imagine if they poured $80 billion into feeding the hungry instead of this failed cartoon universe that nobody wanted,” wrote one X user.
“Zuckerberg killed the Metaverse after burning $80 billion on cartoon avatars nobody used,” another said.
“Meta has announced it is shutting down its VR metaverse on 15th of June. All 5 users are reportedly devastated,” one person joked.
