alt Hacker NewsMeta Horizon Worlds on Meta Quest is being discontinued
Comments
Interesting, cutting way back in the product they renamed the whole company for.
They feel a bit directionless to me. They are still making money but even their AI attempt feels half hearted. I think they are really trying but I’m not sure they can build the engineering muscle to move in new areas with the brand damage they’ve sustained.
The sign of a company in absolute decline is when the worst possible place to get info about it, is their official announcement. Whoever wrote the announcement went out of their way to obfuscate the crux of the announcement (compare the clear heading on hackernews to their own heading)
If your (well paid) job is to write and communicate clearly, and for a major announcement you come up with this...not much left to say.
Despite the shock at the amount of money meta spent on their version of the metaverse, I don't think they spent nearly enough to accomplish their vision.
Meta, to the detriment of the market, tried too early in the VR lifecycle to own the market. They basically tried to become the iPhone and Apple in the year 1990.
Tell me, do you believe any singular company in the year 1990, with 100B to burn, would be able to create the iPhone, in any of its varations? Absolutely not, there too much research, too much to invent, too much to program and not nearly enough talent and money for one company to manage.
Condolences to those that about to be laid off
Context: https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/14/meta-reportedly-considerin...
I met some of my best friends in VR, and had life-changing social interactions in some VR games on the Oculus platform... Especially EchoVR. I'm still a true believer in VR as a medium. It'll go mainstream one day, and there will be a Meta-sized company built upon it.
They had lightning in a bottle and somehow lost it. Honestly it might have been hiring Carmack that sent them down this path. Moving away from PCVR expanded the market, but it also killed the magic. Now the quest store is a wasteland of what look like low budget mobile apps.
It’s wild how much mismanagement Zuck is able to get away with just because he controls majority voting shares in Meta. At this point all of the missteps by the company in AR/VR, AI and everything else can directly be traced back to him. Half-baked vision, massive spending and no accountability. The company desperately needs a Sundar/Satya type leader.
Wow, Meta just doesn't know what to do with this AI thing, and they are just doing whatever they think is right to just get into AI. However, they are just spending billions, yielding nothing in return. Insane.
Output from Kagis LinkedIn Speak -> English.
Probably more accurate? :
"Earlier this year, we admitted we have no idea what to do with VR or Horizon. We’re splitting them up because they’re both failing in different ways, and we’re turning Horizon Worlds into just another shitty mobile app. This mess is going to break everything, including the app on your phone. To "streamline" things—which is code for cutting costs—here is everything we’re taking away from you through 2026.
• Meta Horizon Worlds:
By March 31, 2026, we’re pulling Horizon Worlds and Events from the Quest Store. We’re also killing off Horizon Central, Events Arena, Kaiju, and Bobber Bay in VR. You can play your other favorite VR worlds until June 15, 2026, but after that, we’re deleting the app from Quest entirely. If you still want to use it, you’ll have to stare at a tiny phone screen like everyone else.
• Meta Horizon Hyperscape Capture (Beta):
By March 24, 2026, you can’t watch Hyperscape captures in Horizon Worlds anymore. They’re stuck in some beta app in your library that nobody uses. You can still record stuff, but you’ll be doing it alone because we’re killing the social features.
• Meta Horizon Plus (MH+) Perks:
By March 31, 2026, we’re stripping the Horizon-specific crap—like Meta Credits and digital clothes—out of your subscription. We’re charging you the same price for less stuff, but hey, you still get the monthly games.
We’re still spending money trying to make the Quest suck less—we added a keyboard and let you move windows around, and we’re forcing a new interface on you whether you want it or not."
It's baffling to me how much they juiced up this platform on Horizon OS, and now they're just axing it from there entirely. Millions if not billions of dollars gone to waste. At least I won't have to see it in the UI anymore, I guess. How does this even happen?
Where will all those Meta Avatars go? Is there a retirement home in the Metaverse?
The most obvious and expected outcome to everyone except Zuck.
saved for later. exactly the kind of deep dive i was looking for
Okay, how long until Meta Quest is discontinued/sunset?
I believe there is no expectation of a Meta Quest 4 right?
That's okay - it felt cartoony and, I imagine it wasn't the reason why the vast majority of people bought the Quest anyway.
Did they ever get legs?
Does this mean my prime virtual real estate next door to Snoop Dogg's house isn't going to work as my retirement plan anymore?
They were trying to compete with an existing, VERY good couple of alternatives, and the people most actually likely to use that product were already on those services.
It was a losing play that didn’t know what market it was actually entering.
"Updates to Your Meta Quest Experience in 2026" - I like the euphemism
I have a Quest 2, I only use it to play Eleven Table Tennis VR.
I don't understand what Horizon Worlds is or the other thing mentioned.
Is this a prelude to a huge downsizing in reality labs? I wonder what percentage of RL is working on this app.
When will horizon worlds be axed entirely? It has something like fewer than 10,000 active users at any given time.
The quest is such a beautiful device. I hope they continue to work on it and release new versions. VR is so good and still in it's infancy.
I never understood why they were trying to recreate real life social interactions in VR, because it's worse by default, and the majority of the nerds who buy this tech are probably trying to escape that on some level. I know that any time I went into Meta Horizon Worlds, I didn't want to hear 95% of the people I heard talking.
What I do use VR for is Bigscreen VR nearly every night to watch stuff with my friends. Scrolling through reels in a movie theater is pretty fun and even though I never do it solo on my phone, I will sit there for like 3-4 hours in VR enjoying communal brain rot.
Perhaps they should focus on things like that instead of gimmicks that nobody cares about. For example, I have never once played a game in VR that didn't force me to sit or stand in a specific position, meaning to play it, I have to go out of my way to do so.
Facebook's strong suit has always been gossip. Why are they even spending for anything else
Is Meta Horizon Worlds working on PC well? I guess it is their attempt to be competitive with Roblox.
Soon: company rebrand to MetAI
MMOs must be expensive to run
It will be Gemini World instead ...
What a joy to see their Metaverse crash and burn.
They were never able to define this vacuous concept or any value proposition.
Right as AI world models like Genie 3 are taking off too. Seems like a great fit for VR.
That sucks.
At least they had a purpose, a vision.
Now Zuckerberg is going to be all sour about it and even more cynical about everything.
They’re going to go back to what they know how to do: optimize for attention and sell personal data.
Historians will write about the 'metaverse' as the last software frontier humanity embarked on before AI.
What a shame. Hopefully capitalism and AI research does not produce equally bad products and ideas.
Don't be surprised when the hypetrain derails, take the vibeverse less traveled by, and it will make all the difference.
And soon 20% of meta too
Second Life, which contains only niche perverts, has more concurrent actives than Horizon Worlds.
Zucker just keeps failing up.
Imagine what $100B could have done for medical or energy research.
It was terrible, and frankly the only way I see it getting to where it got is by upper management keeping their fingers in their ears and their eyes shut.
I find it utterly fascinating how VR and 3D keep coming back in cycles every couple of decades, but ultimately fail to stick.
3D film was big in the 1950's, but fell out of fashion as colour film processes became cheaper and more ubiquitous. The 3D technology of the day couldn't handle colour film, and colour was a bigger leap forward in immersion than 3D. The 3D surge that happened a couple decades ago was in full-colour, but still subsided. Home video was on the rise, and the expense of 3D in the home was probably to blame, as well as half-baked solutions. I owned a 3D capable projector for a while, but it had to be run at a reduced refresh rate and took a big brightness hit in 3D mode. I watched 3D movies only a couple of times, and stuck to good old 2D after that. I no longer own a 3D capable display.
There was a big content problem with 3D movies. Some movies attempted to WOW you with 3D gimmicks. Scott Cameron's "Ghosts of the Abyss" was guilty of this. It was a mostly 2D documentary that occasionally rammed a robot arm in your face or had a collage of images popping out of the wall for no particular reason. The result was that you were more frequently distracted from the experience by 3D gimmicks than further immersed in it. Other films took the approach of making both 2D and 3D versions available, but this made 3D non-essential to the experience. 3D just didn't add much. I often found myself preferring the 2D version because so many cinemas have brightness problems with 3D projection.
VR was big in the 90's, mainly in VR Cafes. The technology was cool as hell in concept, but the reality was underwhelming. Computers of the day just weren't fast enough, and the results were literally nauseating. VR fell out of fashion, the cafes went out of business, and that was mostly it for VR until a few years ago. The current surge has much better hardware and far more compelling experiences. Valve's Alyx is just plain brilliant! Unfortunately, it's still nauseating for some and a truly civilized VR experience seems just beyond the capabilities of all but the most ridiculously expensive hardware at present. As a result, adoption is poor and the current wave of VR is petering out, like 3D did a decade or so ago. There aren't many VR headsets out there, so there isn't a lot of compelling software, so there isn't a lot of reason for more people to buy expensive headsets, and so on.
For my money, the problem is that VR and 3D aren't as big a leap forward as they need to be in order to justify by their current expense and downsides. People can use their imagination to immerse themselves through a 2D window really effectively. VR probably isn't going to catch on until it's cheap and trouble-free. Eventually, it'll be better/cheaper at delivering a big 2D window than a physical 2D screen can, but it's probably not going to succeed until then.
[dead]
[dead]
Maybe I'm just naive but I don't really understand discontinuing things like this. Like, unless there are like 100 people using this, how can it not be possible to just leave this running at like 0.5% of its former capacity. Just leave up like 1 server, collapse all of the DBs into one, and let these few autists have their stuff.
Unbelievable. They re-architected the whole operating system around this stupid app. They discontinued their previous homescreen environments in favor of trying to promote Horizon Worlds, only to discontinue the blasted thing anyway? After all of those millions of dollars spent trying to make virtual events happen?