I never loved Horizon Worlds, Meta’s best attempt at creating a social universe for its VR headsets. In fact, I’ve completely avoided it. So I’m not at all surprised that Meta now says it’ll be refocusing Horizon Worlds on Roblox-like phone games.
Is the metaverse dead? No, because the metaverse isn’t just Meta: It just co-opted the philosophical term. But the company’s biggest investment in virtual worlds has turned out to be a failure. And it’s just the “tip of the iceberg pivot” that Meta’s doing right now, as it tries to turn its VR efforts into a win with future AR glasses.
I’ve been somewhat stunned by Meta’s series of seemingly give-up-on-VR moves over the last few months, which included shutting down its best VR game studio acquisitions, killing off the best and most innovative VR fitness platform (also an acquisition), and ending attempts to make its VR ecosystem into a work software tool.
Meta’s new head of Reality Labs content, Samantha Kelly, admitted in a new blog post that VR hasn’t been the big seller Meta expected, echoing recent statements from Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth. Though VR headsets will still exist going forward, according to Meta, the company will lean on third-party apps and games to sell the headset instead.
And now it’ll be moving away from trying to make Horizon Worlds happen as the centerpiece of Quest VR.
That’s a bit of a cosmic joke to me, considering that until now, Meta had wasted no effort in trying to bury game developers’ apps by spamming its OS with links to Horizon Worlds. Meta’s Quest app on phones became Horizon-branded and tried to hide app content in favor of weird Horizon Worlds social experiences, too.
While the Quest 3 and 3S are still the best-for-the-money VR headsets, I have no idea what the future holds for these systems. At every turn, I see Mark Zuckerberg and Meta declaring a full-on push to AI and smart glasses. Meanwhile, AI has barely surfaced inside Quest headsets in any meaningful way.
Meta always had its VR ambitions split between everyday work and kid-focused gaming. It got the latter, not the former. It became a kid’s console, even though Meta tried to keep kids away. As a result, I don’t think anyone ever took the Quest seriously as anything you’d use for anything else other than games. Neither does Meta anymore, apparently.
So now what, Meta?
Meta’s next steps look like they’ll still be focused on VR a bit, but I think it’ll be as a bridge to glasses. A smaller headset expected sometime in the next year could be more of an attempt to focus on portability and higher-resolution video to compete with display glasses, Apple’s Vision headset and the Samsung Galaxy XR (or even Valve’s upcoming Steam Frame).
However, this shift might signal the end of subsidized gaming hardware, leading to higher prices. It could also mean Meta’s VR pivots toward showcasing immersive films and games rather than building an entire computing universe — or at least one requiring such extensive custom software.
As Meta keeps trying to make advanced AR glasses happen at some point down the road, its glasses are slowly adding displays and apps, but the software on Ray-Ban Displays is embryonic and primitive. It’s nothing like VR, and I have no idea when AR glasses will even get close.
Meta’s moonshot, the AR glasses prototype Orion, needed a separate processing puck to work. That’s basically a similar idea to Xreal and Google’s upcoming Project Aura set of glasses, which also uses a puck. But the difference between Google and Meta is that Google plans to eventually put the processing on next-gen phones to run these AR glasses. Meta has no ability to do that, because it’s bottlenecked by Google and Apple.
And then what? Unlike Apple, Google and Samsung, Meta doesn’t have its own phone platform. Glasses are going to work with phones. That’s going to be Meta’s bottleneck, no matter how many times it tries to reshuffle its metaverse and device vision. VR headsets may have been a way to try to get around phones, but when it comes to glasses, it’s unavoidable.
I don’t see how Horizon Worlds will ever be popular as another phone gaming app in a world dripping in Roblox-alikes. And as I said about Meta’s decision to destroy the fitness app Supernatural, what pieces does Meta have for its glasses push that are going to really be ready to compete with what Google, and likely Apple, are going to bring — fitness, app hook-ins, media, mapping, future car integrations and everything else?
As Meta seems ever more ready to abandon so much of what it tried to build in VR, I wonder if it will realize that glasses just aren’t ready yet, app-wise, to pick up the journey on the other side. Even if the goal is to lean heavily on AI to do it.
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