Meta had a change of heart just less than 48 hours after the company publicly confirmed to fans that it was pulling the plug on Horizon Worlds for VR. Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth said that Horizon Worlds for Quest will stick around for the “foreseeable future”. On backtracking on the earlier announcement to shut down the VR version of Metaverse, Andrew “Boz” Bosworth explained on an Instagram AMA the community was adamant that they wanted to have access to Horizon Worlds on Meta Quest headsets. “We have decided, just today in fact, we will keep Horizon Worlds working in VR for existing games,” Bosworth said. He added that the Horizon Unity runtime games that currently exist will continue to operate in VR and won’t be ported to mobile platforms. At the same time, Meta isn’t currently planning on making any more Horizon World games for VR. And that’s because “the creator and consumer energy were already big on mobile,” he said.Bosworth also wrote an Instagram post on the same. In his post, Bosworth said, “We will keep Horizon Worlds working in VR for existing games, to support the fans who’ve reached out.” He added, “For people who already have games they like that they’re using in Horizon Worlds, [they] will be able to download the Horizon Worlds app and use it in VR for the foreseeable future.”Bosworth also said that there was “a lot of misinformation” about the company’s plans. “We announced, ‘hey, we’re moving away from Horizon Worlds in VR,’ and the headline is that Horizon is dead,” he said. “It’s not. And likewise, VR is not dead. We’re continuing to invest tremendously.”He described Metaverse as a “misunderstood concept” that was never meant to only encompass virtual reality. “When somebody is using their phone and you’re physically with them, they’re at the dinner table with you, and yet when you talk to them, they hear nothing because they’ve transported themselves through the glowing rectangle into a digital space,” he said. “Maybe that they’re scrolling media, maybe that they’re in the text world, but like they have transported themselves. So we’ve always had this internally — at least me and Mark — this very expansive construct of the Metaverse,” added Bosworth.
Meta announcement of shutting down VR Horizon Worlds access in June
Earlier Meta announced that Horizon Worlds will be inaccessible via virtual reality headset after June 15, 2026. The company shared plans to separate Horizon Worlds from Quest VR platform and focus exclusively on the smartphone version of the app in February and last week in a new post on its community forums, Meta detailed when the VR version of Horizon Worlds will be deprecated. It said that by March 31, individual Horizon Worlds and Events will no longer be listed in the Quest’s Store and headset owners will be unable to visit worlds like “Horizon Central, Events Arena, Kaiju and Bobber Bay.” Then, after June 15, the app will be removed from Quest headsets and worlds will be completely unavailable to visit in VR. From that point on, the easiest place to visit Horizon Worlds will be in the Meta Horizon app for iOS and Android.
