Meta pulls the plug on quest horizon worlds in june

Meta is yanking Horizon Worlds from Quest headsets on 15 June, a quiet burial for the cartoonish hangout that once embodied Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse gospel. Users will still be able to enter the blocky plazas on a phone, but the goggles that were supposed to teleport us into the next internet will no longer load the app.

Reality labs trims another limb

The shutdown lands three months after 1 000 Reality Labs layoffs and the shuttering of internal VR studios. CTO Andrew Bosworth told remaining staff the division’s marching orders had flipped: fewer fully-immersive worlds, more wrist-worn AI wearables like the Ray-Ban Meta glasses. Translation: the metaverse piggy bank is being raided to bankroll the generative-AI arms race.

Investors never warmed to Zuckerberg’s pivot. Since the 2021 Facebook-to-Meta rebrand, Reality Labs has burned US $46 billion while logging scant revenue. Child-safety groups, meanwhile, pounced on Horizon’s lax moderation and legless avatars. The app’s monthly active count on Quest reportedly stalled below 300 000 last year—smaller than some indie Steam titles.

Zuckerberg still insists the “metaverse” will arrive, just not on the timetable he once trumpeted. Yet each retreat—first the wallet-draining headset subsidies, now the flagship social space—makes the original sermon harder to remember. The company’s earnings call next month will likely tout AI-driven ad tools, not virtual real-estate metrics. Horizon Worlds lives on mobile, but stripped of its native headset, it feels like a ghost of a promise haunting a platform that moved on.