Meta Platforms plans to close its virtual reality user-exclusive Horizon Worlds in June, shifting its focus to mobile experiences, marking a change in the company's metaverse strategy that it heavily promoted five years ago.
Horizon Worlds was launched at the end of 2021 as a VR-only online multiplayer platform where users could build and publish virtual environments and games, interacting with others through avatars.
Competitors of Horizon Worlds include Fortnite and Roblox, which have attracted 1.3 million and 144 million daily active users respectively across PC, gaming consoles, and mobile platforms. Fortnite has never officially developed games for VR, while Roblox has offered a VR application since July 2023, although not all worlds support VR.
Meta's redirection of Horizon Worlds coincides with CEO Mark Zuckerberg's shift of the company's focus to the metaverse five years ago, when he changed the name from Facebook to Meta. However, these ambitions have not translated into profitability for the company.
Since 2020, losses at Reality Labs have accumulated to $80 billion.
At that time, Reality Labs' Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth stated that the company would primarily focus on mobile experiences rather than fully immersive virtual worlds accessed through headsets.
A spokesperson for Meta told CNBC that this is a “speculative report” about theoretical approaches.
Over time, blockchain-based metaverses became a hot topic in the crypto industry in 2021, but have since faded from view along with many other trends, overshadowed by the latest AI craze.