Meta is shutting down VR social platform Horizon Worlds in further pivot away from the metaverse

In this article META Follow your favorite stocks CREATE FREE ACCOUNT The Meta Horizon Worlds is being displayed on a smartphone screen, and the Meta logo is in the background in Chania, Greece, on August 9, 2024. Nikolas Kokovlis | Nurphoto | Getty Images Meta announced Tuesday that it is shutting down Horizon Worlds , the virtual reality social network for Quest VR headsets that was once a key piece of the pivot to the metaverse. In a community blog, Meta announced that the Horizon Worlds app will be taken off the Quest store at the end of March, and fully removed from VR on June 15. After that date, 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 shift for Horizon Worlds, which was once a central part of the company's push into virtual reality, comes weeks after Meta cut over 1,000 employees from Reality Labs , the unit responsible for the metaverse. The January cuts in Reality Labs also hit studios that were working on VR titles, including Ouro Interactive, an in-house studio that debuted in 2023 to build first-party content for Horizon Worlds. When Meta changed its name from Facebook in October 2021 to cement the pivot to the metaverse, CEO Mark Zuckerberg called it "the next frontier." "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 at the time when announcing the change . Read more CNBC tech news CEO Jensen Huang sees $1 trillion in orders for Blackwell and Vera Rubin through '27 Bill Gurley on AI bubble: A bunch of people got rich quick and a reset is coming Meta stock climbs nearly 3% on report of planned layoffs to offset AI spending Big Tech purchases of carbon credits explode amid AI race, wit...