Is this the beginning of the end for the Metaverse?

When Facebook became Meta in 2021, founder Mark Zuckerberg stood before the world and declared his Metaverse was "the next frontier."

Horizon Worlds, a 3D social platform where users appeared as avatars and built virtual hangouts, was the flagship that would make it real.

This week, Meta announced Horizon Worlds would be removed from Quest VR headsets entirely and be survived only as a mobile app.

A day later, Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth reversed the decision on Instagram after fans pushed back, promising VR [virtual reality] access would continue "for the foreseeable future," but with minimal support.

For a company that once promised to build a whole new digital universe, that's not a footnote. It's more like a fundamental rewrite of the entire vision.

Reality Labs, the division that houses Meta's VR ambitions, has burned through more than $80 billion since 2021. Quest headset sales fell 16 percent year-on-year between 2024 and 2025, according to data from IDC. Appfigures says Horizon's mobile app has been downloaded 45 million times, but total consumer spending on it amounts to just $1.1 million.

Analysts and former Meta employees have pointed to a fundamental mismatch between the technology and actual human behaviour.

Social media succeeded because it mapped onto things people were already doing – sharing photos, messaging friends, following celebrities.

What the metaverse required was something different: new equipment and asking people to do things they could do, for the most part, on their phones and without an avatar.

For the past year, Zuckerberg has been pushing Meta as a serious generative AI competitor. To build out a new superintelligence team, the company has been luring top AI researchers with extraordinary compensation packages – some reportedly valued at hundreds of millions of dollars across four years.